


The Properties of a Hero

by therealraewest



Category: The Property of Hate
Genre: AU, Gen, heroswap, heroswap au, tpoh
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-04-17
Updated: 2016-12-21
Packaged: 2018-06-02 20:39:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 13
Words: 30,191
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6581326
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/therealraewest/pseuds/therealraewest
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When the monster child asked the actor if he was a Hero, he had no idea what he was getting himself into by saying yes. A Heroswap fic.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Are you a Hero?

**Author's Note:**

> Takes place in an au where Hero and RGB's roles are reversed. This should be fun.

            _The man on the television smiled, scooping up the small child to his hip and wiping their blubbering tears with a red and white spotted kerchief. He was a beautiful man, sharp cheekbones and golden curls beneath a straw hat, his suit too colorful to be practical and his smile wider and brighter than anyone's had any right to be._

_"Who are you?" asked the child, clinging to their savior._

_"Why," said the man in a cheerful  voice, "I'm the hero."_

_The woman with one eye hummed, observing him through the screen. "So this is your next one, is he? Are you sure?"_

_The television nodded. "He's a Hero."_

 

*

 

            "'Scuse me?"

            The voice was high and tinny; a child's voice distorted by an outdated speaker, giving it the nostalgic essence of an old cartoon.

            "I said, 'scuse me? Mister?"

            If it hadn't repeated itself after he'd opened his eyes, he would have thought it part of a dream. Not that he dreamt, not anymore. It was ages since he'd last been able to remember having any sort of dream that lingered after waking.

            Blinking the sleep from his eyes, he turned his head towards the small voice. There to greet him, impossibly, was a television.

            Actually, to call the thing a television was a gross understatement and by no means truly explicatory of the nature of whatever it was that was sitting on his desk, swinging child-sized green wellies against the fake wood and grinning (was that a grin?) down at him. The pre-dawn sky outside of his window was just bright enough to give the man details on the creature - what appeared to be a red and yellow Mickey Mouse television suspended in air above a child's red raincoat and boots. Its screen held a color test bar across the lower half, curved upwards into a crescent that gave the illusion of a smile, with excess colors dripping down the bottom of the red plastic casing in thin rivulets of green, cyan and magenta.

            Oddly enough, one of his first thoughts was why a television should need a raincoat and boots.

            Noticing he was awake, the smile widened and the childlike thing leaned forward, supporting itself with arms braced against the edge of his desk.

            "Are you a Hero?" it asked, the voice chipper, as if unaware of its own obscurity.

            He stared at it.

            The small green boots kicked impatiently, thumping against the desk in a way that reminded him with every noise that this thing was very much real and very much in his room.

            "Well?" it asked after a moment. "I need a Hero to save the world."

            The man who was currently staring at the monster on his desk from the relative safety of his bed was many things. A coward, definitely. A liar, almost always. A trickster and a thief only for self preservation.

            Especially in this moment, however, he was two things.

            He was vain.

            And he was an actor.

            Regardless of his acting abilities (his damn good acting abilities, if he did say so himself), a lie that big would have stuck in his throat on the way out, so he answered her question with a nod.

            The smile widened and the child (was it a child?) clapped her hands soundlessly, bouncing with excitement. The newly appointed Hero noticed that her sleeves, even as they moved, hung empty, with no hands poking out of them to clap together.

            "I knew it!" the child cried happily. "Come on, get up! There's so much to do!"

            "Hold on," said the Hero, propping himself up. "Might I get dressed first? I cannot possibly save the world in my undershirt."

            The child giggled, nodding. "Of course. Wear only your favorite things, that's important!"

            Favorite things? Well, if that was the case... The Hero moved to his closet and withdrew a suit he hadn't worn in years; a colorful, brash number he's used in one of his first features. Blue and red pinstripes were definitely the look of a hero, especially one beside a creature as colorful as that child. The tellyhead waited patiently as he dressed, turning to peer out the window at the sky changing colors for the dawn.

            "What sort of danger are we to save the world from, hm?" he asked as he straightened his bowtie in the mirror. "Big scary monsters?"

            The child laughed again from somewhere behind him. "There will be monsters, but they're not all big and scary."

            "Oh? And I suppose you're a monster, then, too?" he asked, not taking his eyes from his reflection. The look was missing something... he reached for the straw hat on his hatstand and perched it atop his golden curls.

            "Of course," came the child's voice, just behind him. He turned to see her intently examining an old bamboo cane of his. His lips twitched up and he reached out a hand for it. The tiny monster obliged and he gave the old thing a twirl, reveling in how familiar it felt in his gloved hand. Yes, it would be just like old times. He'd take the cane with him. He was excited enough that the child's next words barely even made him worry. "I'm the very worst one."

            "Really?" asked the Hero incredulously. "Well, if you're the very worst monster I'm sure to meet then I don't think we'll have any trouble at all." He gave his reflection one last look and nodded to himself. "I'm ready when you are."

            "You sure?" asked the supposed Very Worst Monster, tiny blots of blue and yellow spotting at the base of her screen. "Nobody you'd like to say goodbye to?"

            He shook his head, trying to ignore the piles of papers on his desk as he smiled. Perhaps if he hadn't been so focused on not thinking, that question would have caused him more pause, but for now he chose to not worry about any of the things that he should have.

            "Alright then," she said. "How do we get to the roof?"

 

*

 

            The horizon was alight with yellows and oranges, the smog of the already-running factories hovering above the sunrise to blot out more and more light as the altitude increased, until the highest point where the last of the morning stars still twinkled against the blue-grey. The child leaned almost dangerously out over the side of the building, as if trying to memorize every detail of the sunrise. After a couple of moments, she looked back at him, colorful smile wide.

            "Alright, then! Time to go!"

            "Go where, exactly?" he asked, looking about. Despite himself, he'd half expected there to be some form of magical door or portal that the young monster had planned to use for their journey.

            Instead, the child raised an empty sleeve towards his cane, pointing. "Can I borrow that?"

            "Hm? Oh, of course," he said, offering it. The wood seemed to hover a few inches from the red sleeve, held by an invisible hand. He wasn't sure if he'd ever get used to that.

            The monster looked left, then right, then trotted over to a steam vent and tapped the cane against it a couple of times. She nodded, content, and looked back at him. "You can have your cane back now."

            He blinked, then walked over and reclaimed it, looking from the cane in his hands to the young monster and back again. "And what, exactly, was the purpose of that?"

            The red arm lifted again, pointing at the steam coming from the vent. "Look!"

            He did, and what he saw made him gasp. The steam was shaping itself, up and up, into a staircase that led all the way up to the clouds.

            "Up we go!" the monster chirped, climbing it's way up onto the first step, which amazingly held beneath her.

            "Hold on just a moment," said the Hero, anxiety raising in his throat. "You don't honestly expect me to climb that?"

            "Why not?" asked the monster.

            "Well, just look at it! There's no way I won't just fall right through!"

            In response, the small monster jumped up and down on their step. It held solid beneath their boots. "Seems solid to me."

            "You also have no substance. You could be feather light, or even imaginary for all I know, and- and... where are you going?"

            "Up!" called the monster from several stairs higher than she had just been.

            The Hero hesitated for a moment, looking at the staircase and at the climbing monster, then back at the skylight he'd just climbed out of. He wondered if this would all vanish if he decided to turn and return to his own bed, to pretend none of this had happened and live his life as it had been.

            His thoughts turned to the papers on his desk, disheveled by the small monster who'd sat upon them.

            His jaw set and he looked up towards the staircase. Steeling his nerves, he lifted his knee and gingerly placed his weight onto the first stair.

            It held.

            As did the next one. And the next. As long as he kept his focus on the steps themselves and not on the increasingly further ground below them, he could climb. Somewhere ahead of him, he heard a shout of encouragement from his tiny monster, but he was so focused on not panicking that he couldn't make out the words. One step at a time, lifting and placing fake spats on impossibly solid shelves of vapor. Somehow, before he knew it, his head popped up through a layer of clouds. He climbed up onto it, finding it as solid as the staircase had been, though blessedly more opaque so that he couldn't see how high up he actually was. The fear that all solidity would vanish in an instant and send him plummeting to his unfortunate demise was still there, although less than when he could actually observe said potential demise looming below him.

            He looked for the monster and found her quickly. She was rolling around in the cloud fluff, throwing armfuls of it up in the air and laughing as it floated back down. She looked up at him and her color bar formed into a grin as she held up an armful of cloudstuff towards him. He waved a hand, declining her offer.

            "This is always my favorite. It's so fluffy!" she squeaked, nuzzling into it.

            There was a fizzle and a pop and the monster squeaked, dropping the armful of fluff and rubbing the front of her casing with invisible hands. Her color smile was replaced with a color frown.

            "Are you alright?" the Hero asked.

            "Yeah," she said, her sleeve mopping up a spot of blue. "I always forget it's made of water."

            "Water isn't good even for magical televisions, hm?"

            "Nope. It's not too bad if I'm careful, though." She spoke with a casual earnestness. The Hero wondered if she was that matter-of-fact with all things that might kill her on accident. He also pondered if aversion to water was the reason she wore a raincoat and boots, and if the hood of her raincoat would even fit over her head, little ear-speakers and all.

            "Anyway, let's keep going!" she said, brushing the excess cloud fluff from her coat and heading in what seemed to the Hero to be a completely arbitrary direction. He followed behind, matching her quick steps with long strides of his own, glad for his long legs.

            After a while of walking, golden archways began to appear among the cloudscape. Each stood empty, only small white sigils floating above them giving any indication as where they might lead. Hero found himself fascinated by them, looking about and wondering if this, perhaps, could be what the gates of heaven looked like.

            This in itself turned out to be a troubling thought.

            "Um..." he said, meaning to catch the attention of his small guide and realizing for the first time that he didn't know her name.

            "Yes?" she said, peering back at him but not slowing her pace.

            "Yes, well," he said, "I'm not... dead, am I?"

            "Well I hope not," said the monster. "There's not much use in the world for dead Heroes."

            "Right," said the Hero, feeling a lot less comforted by her answer than he hoped he'd be.

            She led him to a doorway with a small, simple curve glowing above it. The monster's sleeves patted at the pockets of her jacket, and from one she pulled a small golden key, the end of which matched the curving pattern above the door. She moved it towards a keyhole that had appeared in the empty space within the glowing frame.

            "Oh, and you can call me Argie," she said, peering at a tiny floating eye above the keyhole.

            "Argie?" asked Hero.

            "It's my name," she grinned up at him. "Isn't it cute?"

            "Oh, I see. R-G, like R-G-B, the colors on a television, yes?" he asked.

            Her smile faded to what may have been a pout. "I'm just Argie, though." She took a step back, nodding her head towards the doorway. "After you, Mister Hero."

            He looked past her to the doorframe, which was changing as he watched from gold to a radiating violet. He looked down to the monster, Argie, for some comfort, and she nodded again, rocking on her heels.

            Taking a deep breath, Hero stepped forward and into the unknown.


	2. Step 1: Bravery

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Failed step 1.

            He wasn't sure exactly what he was expecting when he stepped through the doorway, but the mixture of purple atmosphere and the gentle silvery-blue glowing coming from what must have been trees was not it. Before him, a jagged path weaved around shallow hills, splitting off like veins leading to distant landmarks. Down and down before him, spreading across most of the view, was a lake so wide that it nearly kissed the horizon.

            The Hero found himself suddenly and inexplicably tired.

            There was a click and he turned to see Argie locking the door behind them, the frame on this side a mere gossamer thread of silver. There was no trace of the golden cloudscape from which they'd come, and as the monster slipped the key into her pocket even the ghost of the doorframe seemed to shimmer and vanish.

            The yawn that Hero was attempting to stifle escaped, sounding foreign among the strange landscape. He hadn't noticed just how quiet it was, as if the whole world were sleeping. But how could that be, he wondered, when he had only just woken up?

            "You're tired," said Argie, walking up beside him. "'S only natural. All the trees are sleeping too."

            "Isn't it morning?" the Hero asked, feeling very unheroic in how much he craved a nap beneath one of the glowing saplings. Just ten minutes...

            "It was, but 's not anymore. C'mon, we can sleep by the lake." She hurried along the path ahead of him.

            "Why not here?" he asked, eying a soft-looking patch of grass longingly.

            "Not safe!" she called.

            With that as incentive, he followed begrudgingly. The path to the lake was relatively straight, and since they were heading downhill the whole time it was an easy trek and he could always see ahead how much further they had yet to go. Eventually Argie's pace slowed so that she could walk closer to him, though still slightly ahead. She kept turning to look up at him, magenta dripping down the bottom of her casing and falling somewhere down the neck-hole of her jacket. The Hero was too preoccupied with trying to keep his eyes open to notice her much, until something warm and solid and _tingly_ brushed his fingers.

            His hand jerked back on impulse, and he looked down to see a very guilty looking Argie pulling her arm back as well. Blue welled at her screen and dripped, and she looked away.

            He wasn't sure if it was him or she who should apologize, and apparently Argie was also unsure on the matter because they made the rest of the trip in silence.

            Finally, her small voice announced "We're here."

            Hero opened his eyes, which had been closed for the last several minutes of the journey as he trudged along on autopilot. Before him spread the lake, much bigger close up. The flat surface reflected the glowing lights of trees on the other side and the indigo hue of the wide open sky above them. Argie was making a bed for herself beneath some blue bushes at the water's edge.

            "So it is safe here?" Hero asked, only half caring for her answer. The tree across from Hero's bush was calling to him as an ideal place to lean against to get some much-desired sleep.

            "Safer," she answered. "Do you have dreams?"

            "Not anymore," answered Hero, sitting himself against the base of the tree and pulling his hat down over his eyes. _Just a few winks of sleep, that's all I need._

            "S'okay. I dream, so as long as you're not too far you should be safe, too."

            He didn't have the energy to wonder what she was getting on about, so he just mumbled "oh" and closed his eyes.

            He didn't wake until the morning.

 

*

 

            When he did wake, it was to the unpleasant discovery that some sort of snail had crawled into his hair and was hanging before his eyes on a blonde curl. He made the most undignified noise as he flung it away, standing and shaking himself in an attempt to rid his person of any other unwelcome guests. The snail, luckily, landed on a small leafy plant beside the water, whose stalk swayed desperately from the velocity and shook the poor thing up more as it frantically changed colors.

            The Hero gave himself one last shiver and flexed his fingers, thoroughly awake and very much unnerved. His gaze moved about, taking in the lake, the translucent tree he had slept against (now lacking the glowing leaves from the night before), the tiny Argie still curled up and sleeping. All still very much real, despite everything logic told him about the events of the night (morning?) before.

            He approached the sleeping girl and knelt before her, examining her prone form. Her screen had switched to a flickering static, showing her lack of consciousness, and the little ear-shaped speakers atop the casing let out a silent hiss of white-noise to match. From her head floated tiny outlines of simplistic flowers, like a child's drawing, the images of which would float about her and fade once they'd strayed too far. He wasn't sure what exactly to make of this, and was about to reach his hand out to touch one of the odd shapes when a voice floated over from the direction of the lake.

            "You do not trust her?"

            He started, looking towards the source. Perched on a small stalk by the water was a large-winged grey butterfly with rather disconcerting eye spots that made the Hero want to shoo it away at once if only to get it to stop staring.

            He decided, rather foolishly he thought, to answer it instead. "Of course not. I do my best not to trust anybody."

            The wings fluttered a bit, and Hero wasn't sure if he heard a chuckle or not.

            "That is a strange view for a Hero."

            "I'm not really a hero," he admitted. "I just play one, sometimes."

            The wings ruffled again. "But you are a Hero."

            "And how do you know?"

            "Because you came here."

            He considered this a moment. "I only came because she brought me."

            "And why was that?"

            "Because she needed..." his brow furrowed. "Because she needed a Hero."

            "Exactly," said the butterfly. Its wings fluttered, and the man couldn't help but see a face in it, the bottom wings forming a stuffy mustache that twitched with amusement. "I must go, but I will see you again. Be wise, Hero."

            With that, the butterfly took off across the lake, leaving the stem it took off from to wither before Hero's eyes. He watched it go for a few moments before huffing and turning back to his sleeping guide.

            "And to think," he said, mostly to himself. "I always say not to work with children or animals."

 

*

 

            He tried to while the time before Argie woke up by exploring, but upon running into the first of many grey worm-like things with a mouth full of sinister spiral teeth he decided that he was much better off sticking close to his guide, even if she was sleeping.

            He was washing his face at the side of the lake when he heard a small _whiiiiirrrrr-click!_ and turned to see Argie stretching, her color-bar mouth in a wide yawn.

            As he watched, she quickly dug in her pocket for a small glass vial and swiped it through the air around where her head had been, catching wisps of colored smoke that had previously held the forms of flowers. She tucked the full vial back into her pocket and patted it contentedly.

            "About time you woke up," Hero said, alerting her to his presence. He motioned towards her pocket with a vague finger. "What was that you just did?"

            "Oh," she said, looking up at him and rubbing the sleep from her non-existent eyes, a motion he thought very human for a monster. "Just saving some for later." He didn't get a chance to ask just what she meant by that before she dove straight into "Did you sleep well?"

            "Like a baby," he fibbed, rolling one shoulder in an attempt to get a knot out of it. There was a small pop and he felt his hat grow strangely heavier on his head. His guide frowned, the color bar puckering upwards in the middle.

            "Not comfortable?" she asked, disregarding his previous statement. "Usually trees are the best places to sleep during the nighttime."

            "I- Didn't I just say-" he sputtered, pushing up the brim of his hat in an attempt to lighten it. "Haven't you people ever heard of beds? And why do you keep staring at me, is there something on my face?"

            In response, Argie lifted an arm, motioning at something above her Hero's head. He lifted his hand up and found something soft and warm sitting on top of his head. He instantly batted it off and a small white... _something_ fell to the ground before him.

            "What the devil is that?" he cried, stepping away from the thing that leaned back to look up at him with beady black eyes.

            "That's a lie," said Argie. "It's just a little white one, though."

            "Lies don't have physical forms," said the Hero, squinting at his lie and being careful to get no closer to it.

            "Of course they do. They pop up when they're told. They're not dangerous, as long as they're little, but they grow."

            "So, what, that thing appeared because I said I had a good night's sleep?"

            "Mhm."

            The Hero scoffed. "That's preposterous."

            "Suit yourself," said Argie with a shrug. "But it's good to know what things are here. Like those squishy things by your feet are Doubts, and those-" she cut off, her gaze out over the lake. The color bar fell to barely a blip on the bottom of her screen, and yellow began to flow freely from one corner. "Thoooose shouldn't be here."

            "What?" asked the Hero, turning to see what had caught her attention.

            He immediately wished he hadn't. The surface of the lake was broken in several spots by what looked like scratchy black lines that met at sharp angles. The creatures were made of triangles and slashes and hollow eyes that seemed to all be staring straight into him regardless of the direction of their head. Ice flooded Hero's veins at the very sight of them.

            "It's okay," said Argie behind him, her voice an exaggerated whisper. "Just stay calm. If you're not afraid they can't hurt you."

            "It's a little late for that," whimpered Hero. He immediately went to counting the things. Four- no, five, five of the things were still dripping with lake water, moving slowly but vaguely towards his position on the shore.

            "Stay right there," said his guide, and he heard the scuffling sounds of the child crawling towards him through the grass. "Don't move or-"

            "I'm not moving!" he hissed, perhaps a bit too loudly. The closest of the creatures snapped its head towards him. It nearly disappeared when viewed head-on, like turning a pencil drawing sideways. He couldn't stop shaking.

            Argie was beside him now, digging in her pockets. The creatures grew closer, agonizingly slowly. Two of the creatures crawled onto the shore on their left and right, about to cut them off from the land.

            "They're surrounding us," Hero pointed out in a frantic whisper.

            "I know," said Argie.

            " _What do you mean, 'you know_?'"

            "We just need to get them all together and we'll be alright. You just have to trust me."

            The two were nearly behind them now. A few more moments and they would be trapped, cornered against the edge of the lake and completely surrounded by the sharp monstrosities that were beginning to make warning cries of _crrrrrrkkkkk **kkkKKKK** -_

            Hero turned heel and bolted for the opening between the two that were attempting to flank them. Argie cried out in protest but her voice was drowned out by a piercing **_KREEEE_** that bounced from creature to creature, a rallying cry as they changed tactics and charged. Hero just barely managed to duck between the two before they collided with each other. He didn't wait to see if they would need a moment to untangle as he booked it towards anywhere but here.

            "Wait! Come back! Don't split them up!" cried Argie. "I only have so many- Ah!"

            He turned to see her duck as the razor sharp beak of one of the creatures sliced at her head. As he watched, he saw her throw something towards the ground, and a sudden colorful vapor engulfed two of the three creatures around her. Their screams were agonizing, nails raking down a chalkboard that made the Hero want to fall to his knees and cover his ears, but then the sound was gone and so were two of the creatures.

            The tiny tellyhead didn't waste time to revel in her victory. She turned towards Hero, her sleeves moving up to her screen like hands cupping around a mouth. "Knees up! They'll get your feet!"

            He barely had time to ask what she meant by that when black lines erupted from the ground next to his shoe. He immediately switched to high-stepping and circled back towards his guide, realizing that she was much more likely to be able to kill the things than he was to out be able to outrun them.

            "Good!" she cheered, lifting an arm in the air and waving something in her invisible hand. "Lead them here, I only have one-"

            There was a strangled choke. Hero could see the creature behind her, see the shoulders and the arms and the legs, but it took him a moment longer to see the thin black line that showed a beak sticking straight through the chest of the tiny monster.

            Her arm fell, and whatever had been in her grasp tumbled and rolled on the grass. Hero could only stare, his mind blank yet racing as he searched the static on her face for any sign of life. The thing which had impaled her was humming, humming, and then it stopped suddenly. It grasped her tiny shoulders with needle-like phalanges, extracted its beak and began dragging her towards the lake.

            It didn't take a genius to know where that was going.

            There was a twitch, a flicker, and then Argie was jerking in the grasp of the larger beast, kicking her boots and screaming. By all signs she was doing her damndest to make herself impossible to be moved, but the black thing was still making slow but steady progress towards the lake with her.

            With a wet _THWAP_ a Doubt smacked across the face of her captor. Both the stick creature and the child looked towards the source to see a very frightened yet stoic Hero, balling his gloved fists at his sides as he made an attempt to stare down the thing that was stealing his guide. His attempt faltered as soon as he met it's hollow, white-eyed gaze, and his knees shook visibly and nearly buckled.

            "N-now you see here!" he tried, his voice cracking under the weight of his terror. He tried again and somehow did worse. "N-now y-you-"

            "The dream!" Argie shouted at him, incidentally reminding her captor of her presence. It started dragging her again, choosing to ignore the Hero completely. "Use the dream!"

            "The _what_?" he responded.

            "The **_dream_**!" was the last she managed before she devolved into straight screaming as the thing shoved her head towards the surface of the lake. She'd stopped flailing to use all of her strength in just trying to push herself off from the ground in a vain and failing effort to keep her screen from meeting the water's surface.

            The Hero fought against the fear and confusion in his own mind as he tried and failed to gain any sort of meaning from her words. "That doesn't make any sens-!"

            Pain. He heard the rip of fabric and there was heat and there was fear and there was **pain**. He stumbled forward and something cracked beneath his foot, and just as suddenly as it had appeared the pain was gone and there was warm and light and-

            The things around him screamed, but they were inconsequential. The thing that had been holding Argie let out a death rattle and vanished, leaving the small girl shaking as she knelt on the shore of the lake, but it didn't matter. His mind had gone so full that it had emptied and he tried desperately to deal with the barrage of sensory inputs and thoughts that were drowning him.

            Fabric. His suit had ripped. He reached behind him and felt the gash, no, gashes. three, parallel. A raking claw. All the way down, he felt skin, felt heat, felt the vapor around him seep into the wounds. He ran a hand against the lowest, felt the way his skin was parted, the grooves left behind. He moved his hand in front of him to see just how much he was bleeding and his glove came back just as white as it had been before. Where was the blood? Shouldn't he be bleeding? Shouldn't he be dead? Why was he not-

            "Hero?"

            There was a television looking at him from her knees beside a lake that was too still and he wasn't bleeding and he wasn't breathing and-

            His knees buckled and he was unconscious before he hit the ground.


	3. Friends of a Friend

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Hero meets some of Argie's friends.

_"The House of Paint is no longer receiving-"_

_"It's me!"_

_"Of course it is," Madras sighed as she stepped down from the stool she used to see out of the peephole. She tucked it aside so that she could open the door. "Back so soon, child? Whatever happened to that Hero of yours?"_

_The tiny monster on her doorstep had a man dragging behind her, and Argie was stooped over with the weight of him. One of his arms was slung over her tiny shoulders. Madras considered them for a moment before taking his other arm and helping Argie get him inside._

_"He's more handsome in person," she commented, looking sidelong at his face. "And he's not dead?"_

_"I think he just fainted."_

_"A pity, and here I was thinking you'd brought me a gift. Why do you only ever bring them to me while they're alive?"_

_Argie continued her explanation, ignoring the words of the merchant. "He had a dream to fix up what the Fears did, but he might need another for the shock," explained the child_

_They propped him into Madras's favorite chair, where he hung limp as a rag doll._

_"So why bring him to me? You have your own dreams to use, do you not?"_

_The child monster shifted from one foot to the other, not taking her gaze from the face of her Hero._

_"...You've run out." Supplied Madras. The silence from Argie was nothing but confirmation. " Surprising, since usually you are the one selling your excess to me."_

_"...'s a lot of Fears," mumbled the child._

_"Or perhaps you've been having fewer dreams of your own, lately?"_

_Again, silence supplied her answer. Madras  turned towards her wares, pushing up her sleeves as her mind worked to figure out which dream would be best for a fainted Hero._

 

*

 

            _"If I could begin to be_

_half of what you think of me,"_

Darkness. Fear.

            He was drowning. He was dying.

            No, he was dreaming.

            _"I could do about anything_

_I could even learn how to love,"_

            He was dreaming, and that damned child next door was watching cartoons. At this hour?!

            What hour was it, anyway?

            _"I used to think that I was bad_

_now I know that it's true,"_

He'd fallen asleep on the chair again. It must've been a late night. And in his clothes, too! He shifted, trying to re-find the comfortable position he'd just moved himself out of. Perhaps if he tried hard enough he could shut out the noise and fall back asleep. Perhaps if he was lucky he wouldn't ever wake up again.

            _"'Cuz I think you're so good_

_and I'm nothing like you."_

The chair moved beneath him and seemed to sigh.

            He leapt out of it with a yelp, fully awake now.

            The chair blinked up at him, irate at him waking it up, as if the shock of discovering that your bed was alive wasn't a reasonable excuse for panic.

            It took a moment to sort out where exactly he was. Shelves that were little more than abstract scratches of browns and greens reached up and up to a ceiling he couldn't see, filled in places with glass vials and vases. Skulls, both antlered and not, hung mounted on the walls, empty sockets gazing down at him from all angles. All around, things seemed to be more like impressions of themselves than actual objects, and colors seemed to leak and drip and bleed into one another freely.

            Argie was seated on a counter, perched on the too-tall ledge and kicking her heels against the wood with a repeated THUNK-THUNK, THUNK-THUNK. A small tube, like an I.V, connected her television head to an apparatus of vials which were nearly full with rainbow ink, separated by color. As he watched, her screen changed from a pastel cartoon to the mix of static and color-bar mouth he knew, and she turned to look at him.

            "You're up!" she cried, lifting her arms in excitement and nearly dislodging the I.V. in the process.

            "So he made it through the night," said a voice from behind him. He whirled to see what looked like a plaid mound on the ground, which as he watched resolved itself into a tiny monster in an overlarge sweater, blinking up at him with one yellow and pink eye. She blinked her lashes and looked him up and down, and he stared back at her. Something about her hurt to look at, and as she stood he realized it was the nature of her sweater. The pattern itself seemed to stay stationary as the woman moved, as if the fabric were merely a translucent window where one could see the true colors beneath. Staring too long made him dizzy, but something else about her made him not want to look away.

            "I told you he would," said Argie as the woman came over to check the progress of the vials.

            "It seems I was wrong," she said, amusement seeping from her voice. "I'll add a nightmare to your tab for that."

            Hero seemed at last to find his voice. "Pardon, I don't believe we've been introduced."

            "Oh?" she said, turning to look at him. A yellow tear dripped from her seemingly constantly brimming eye as she crossed her arms over her chest. "I am Madras, merchant of dreams and other luxuries and Master of the House of Paint." She motioned vaguely to the house in which they resided.

            "I see," said the Hero, who proceeded to bow with a flourish. "And I am the Hero, so I'm told, but-"

            "I know," she responded, sounding more and more amused by the second.

            He faltered, knocked of rhythm.  "Oh, I suppose little Argie must have told you when we arrived, then." He straightened, tugging at the bottom of his jacket. "Anyway, you may call me-"

            "Argie, stop that kicking," Madras suddenly snapped, her eye turning to the small monster. "You'll knock over my best vials."

            "Sorry, Madras," Argie said, tucking one ankle behind the other. "Am I done yet?"

            "Very nearly, child." Madras moved behind the counter, tapping the vials. "Let's see, with this and your tab, we've got you with six dreams and three nightmares-"

            "Seven dreams, two nightmares," corrected Argie, looking over her shoulder at the merchant. "It was still a dream when you gave it to him."

            "Yes, but it was a nightmare by the time he woke up," her single eye landed on the Hero and he shivered, realizing that the shadow on the wall behind her was also peering at him with one single eye. "I am curious as to how you did that, Hero."

            "What can I say," he shrugged with a shaky smile. "I'm a man of many talents?"

            "Hm," said Madras, taking another moment to stare him down before returning her gaze to his guide. "What I mean to say is that you break even, for the first time since we met."

            "Even with my discount?" asked Argie in surprise.

            "Especially with your discount," said Madras. "Dream prices are high; you're not the only one who's feeling the shortage. It is the end of the world, after all."

            Hero's brow furrowed at the casual way that Madras stated that, and he noted that Argie's mouth had puckered into a scowl, with red ink dribbling down the corner of her screen, nearly indistinguishable from the color of her casing.

            The moment didn't last as Madras unhooked the I.V, apparently satisfied with the amount of colors she'd siphoned off.

            "Careful now, you're always woozy afterwards," the tiny merchant said, offering a hand to help Argie off the counter. "I won't be scraping you off my floor if you pass out."

            "'m okay," insisted Argie. "We've gotta get going anyway."

            "We're leaving?" asked the Hero, perking up. "So soon?"

            "Yep! You slept for a long time, we've gotta make some of it up."

            He wasn't sure if he could argue with that, but still he looked to the merchant and racked his brain for an excuse to stall. Breakfast was the only thing that came to mind, and he was halfway through wondering if it would be intrusive to ask for a meal in someone else's home when he realized that he wasn't hungry.

            Which wouldn't have been worrying if it hadn't been nearly two days since he figured he'd last eaten.

            If having a meltdown about the concept of eating ever had a good time, it was definitely not in front of a pretty little monster woman and a child, so he busied himself instead with repressing the gnawing feeling that something was inherently _wrong_ about this place and searching for his hat. It turned out to be by the door with his cane and jacket, which had all been hung up on an antler by a careful hand.

            "Thank you for your generosity and hospitality," Hero said on the doorstep, bowing to kiss one of Madras' hands as she smiled down at him.

            "Do be careful with this one, Argie," she said over his bowed head. "He is a charmer."

            Hero's smile faltered as he lifted his eyes to hers. "'This one?'"

            "Bye Madras!" called Argie, already several steps ahead of Hero down the staircase that led away from the House of Paint. Hero quickly turned and followed, with only a couple of backwards glances at the pink woman who watched them from her doorframe, halfway wary that if he hesitated too long the eccentric child would leave him behind.

            As they descended a number of stairs that appeared by all means to be giant paint swathes suspended in midair, Hero noted that the House of Paint, as it was called, was impossible when one compared the inside to the outside. He distinctly remembered that the main open area of the house was below the front door, down a set of stairs on the inside. And yet, from the outside, the house looked perfectly level from the door up, with nothing beneath the level of the entrance but open air (it was another question entirely about who builds a house suspended like that, what do these people have against _solid ground?)_. Bigger on the inside, he pondered with amusement, but how was that possible?

            His brain was so full of questions that he honestly thought it might burst, and his guide seemed to sense this as she began answering the first of many of his unspoken queries. "Those things from yesterday were Fears, you know."

            "Fears?" he asked, looking down at her and forgetting about the impossible house they'd just left.

            "Yeah. They read what you're most scared of and use it against you." She looked back over her shoulder, and he could have sworn he saw her little mouse-ear speakers twitch. "They affected you a lot because you were scared of _them_ , so they didn't need to read what else you were afraid of."

            "Why wouldn't one be afraid of something like that?" asked Hero, feeling indignation spark somewhere in his chest at being called out for being more cowardly than a child. "Isn't the best thing to fear fear itself, after all?"

            Argie looked at him, thinking, as a small flow of magenta ran from her screen. "I suppose." She seemed about to say something else, but decided against it and kept moving forward.

            "So, when that thing, the Fear, as you called it, when it stabbed you-?"

            "It was reading what I was afraid of."

            "And you're afraid of water."

            "Not particularly."

            The Hero's brow furrowed. "But it was going to push you in the lake, was it not?"

            "I'm not afraid of water," clarified Argie. "But I am afraid of dying. Aren't you?"

            He didn't get a chance to comment on that when his guide gasped loudly, rocking back on her heels in excitement. She immediately began waving her arms over her head and shouting towards a small shape on the horizon.

            "HI TOby!" she called.

            "BUGGER OFF," an irrate voice called back.

            The girl looked up at her Hero, grinning widely. "That's TOby. He's my friend. C'mon, I want you to meet him!"

            She ran off ahead of him, leaving him standing there. "Sounds charming," he said to nobody in particular.

 

*

 

            By the time he caught up, Argie was sitting on a ledge beside what looked like a wooden doll, chattering away. The doll was a bit further from the ledge than she was, as if whoever had placed it there was wary that a stray wind could knock it over the edge if they weren't careful.

            "-and then we saw Madras and now we're here! And that's all the stuff that's happened since I saw you last. What about you?"

            Hero was about to ask why his guide was busying herself talking with an inanimate object when the doll spoke. Or, rather, a voice came from the doll, seeing as there was no movement from its painted-on smile.

            "I sat here and thought about the sweet release of death," he said in a monotone.

            "That's nice. And then you fell over?"

            "Yes, thank you for reminding me." The painted pupils flickered sideways, nearly making Hero jump from his skin. "So you've got another one. Looks colorful."

            Something about the way he was being addressed made the Hero prickle, but more concerning was that this marked the second time a monster had referred to him not being the first Hero they'd seen.

            "And I suppose you're Toby, then," he said, reaching a hand down for a shake.

            "It's TOby and I hope you're not expecting me to grab that," the beady eyes stared him down. "Do dolls often break the laws of their own existence to shake hands with you or are you just that thick?"

            Hero reclaimed his hand and moved to peer over the opposite edge of what appeared to be a dock made entirely out of books. Familiar phrases from children's stories floated impossibly over the surface of whatever it was they were standing on.

            "And how's the Endless Deep been?" asked Argie, her voice chipper.

            "Endless and deep," said TOby flatly. "Are you here for a reason or did you just decide to add yourself to my endless torment?"

            "We came here to catch the ferry," said Argie, looking left and right across the void. "I thought he'd be here by now."

            "Didn't your good friend Madras tell you when you saw her?" asked TOby with a dry sarcasm.

            "Tell me what?" asked Argie.

            " _She_ sank it."

            Something about the way TOby said 'She' told Hero that the doll was no longer talking about Madras.

            Argie froze, looking over the ledge. "Did- did the Ferryman?"

            "Like I said," repeated TOby. " _She_ sank it."

            There was a moment of silence, filled only with the howling of wind from the void around them.

            "We'll have to find another way," said Argie resolutely.

            "You see, I think you you're missing the fact that I don't care what you do, as long as you don't stay here," responded TOby.

            The small television was looking about, ignoring the doll as completely as the doll was attempting to ignore her. Her gaze seemed to land on a stack of books and the Hero could almost see the gears turning in her tiny head.

            "Can I borrow some of your books?" she asked.

            "What? Oh, no. No WAY," said TOby. "Those are the only things that keep the wind at bay. Do you have any idea how often I'd fall over without those dumb things working as barriers? And with the Ferry gone who knows how long until someone comes along to pick me back up. I'd rather She not get mad at me a second time, thank you _very_ much."

            "Uuuggghh," said Argie, flopping backwards on the walkway to stare up at the sky.

            The doll seemed to sigh after a moment. "You're really trying to do this, aren't you?" His pupils flicked sideways. "Even after what She did to me? After what She did to that cousin of yours?" His voice hung heavy. "What she'll do to you, too, if she catches you?"

            Argie sat back up, hugging her knees to her chest. She took a few seconds to answer. "Now more than ever. The world needs a Hero."

            "I suppose that's where I come in?" asked Hero, surprising both of them with his continued presence. The direction their conversation was leading in no way appealed to his anxieties, so he took it upon himself to change the subject. "So where is it we go from here, then?"

            "You're the Hero," said TOby. "Why don't you try coming up with a brilliant plan?"

            The Hero looked out over the abyss, seeing nothing useful. "Well," he tried. "If you can't go over, why not go around? If a ferry was built in the first place, surely there was another way to go before, otherwise the two sides would have never had reason to make the trip shorter."

            "Incredible," TOby said. "You get yourself a Hero and his first plan is to go backwards."

            "It works," said Argie. "It's a bit longer, and I hate to lose more time, but it's better than nothing." She got to her feet, taking one last look over the abyss and nodding resolutely. "I'll seeya later, TOby."

            "God, I hope not," said TOby. "Maybe this time you won't come back."

            "C'mon, Hero, we've got a long way to go!" called Argie, marching herself back the way they'd come from.

            As Hero passed the doll, it spoke again. "You could always try jumping. It's a lot faster."

            "I'll keep that in mind," said Hero, trying to ignore the endless expanse of empty air mere feet from him.

            "You're going to die, you know."

            Something ugly fluttered in Hero's chest. "I'll keep that in mind."


	4. Step 2: Reflection

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Self-reflection is a good quality of any Hero.

             As it turned out, the way around the Endless Deep was quite scenic. Trees of bright red twinkled down at the two, and every so often they'd pass another monster. More often than not, Argie would know them, and they'd stop for a moment to chat about many things that the Hero had a hard time making sense of; Elastic Valleys and Plains of Hesitation and The Marketplace. Eventually the monster would mention her human, or Argie would bring him up herself. When this happened, the man among the monsters would make a big show of bowing and introducing himself with a "Hello, I'm the Hero!"

            This always elicited a smile, or at least a coughing laugh, and it certainly always made him swell with pride that it was accepted without question. Him, a Hero, a savior to this world. And not a single monster had disputed him on it! If only the boys back home could see that.

            Between meetings, he began to aim questions towards his small guide, who did her best to either answer them or change the subject so completely that he barely noticed her lack of an actual answer until it was too late to steer back towards it.

            "Why does this world need a Hero?"

            "Because it's dying. Madras doesn't think it can be saved, but I do."

            "And who is killing it?"

            "The same one who sunk the ferry."

            "And who is that?"

            A distraction. A winged cat that Argie insisted on petting before it went on its way, trotting along with perfectly useful wings folded at its sides.

             "Why do the trees glow like that?"

            "They're made of stuff."

            "That's awfully unspecific."

            "Well, we're all made of stuff. It's not stuff like from your world- well, it is, but not really, since in your world it's imaginary, but here it's what we're all made of."

            "So you are also made of 'stuff'?"

            "Exactly! But not as strong of stuff as the trees are. They also dream at night, which is why its safe to sleep where there are trees nearby."

            "And dreams, they are a kind of currency here?"

            "Kinda? People trade stuff here, and dreams are useful for all sorts of things. Madras sells dreams to get stuff from other people, and then she uses that stuff to get more stuff from more people."

            "And what do you trade her?"

            "Colors, mostly."

            "Colors?"

            "Well, they're not really colors, but I dunno how else to call them."

            "When we were with Madras... well, I'm forgetting the wording, exactly, but-"

            "Oh, she thinks you're cute."

            He choked. " ** _What?!_** "

            "Well, she said 'handsome', but-"

            "That's not- Well, I mean, I'm flattered, and the feeling is, ah, well, she's also very- no, no, that's not what I was going to say at all! What I mean is, am I not the first-"

            _"COUSIN!"_

            The two looked up, Argie just in time to see the blur of green before it swept her up and off her feet, swinging her about wildly with her green boots kicking

            "Argie Bee! It's so good to seeya, 'Cuz!" cried the monster. It was green, made of felt, with a tuft of yellow hair and black bead eyes that seemed to squint closed as they hugged their claimed 'cousin'.  Out from the ends of short sleeves came noodle-thin arms that ended in comically large gloves which trapped his guide in a bear-hug. The monster was about Argie's height, perhaps slightly taller, seeing as he'd effectively lifted her off the ground, and reminded Hero immensely of a muppet. Four thin strings connected to the creature, one for each hand and foot, and lifted up into the air above with no visible source (Hero craned his neck to try to see and the effort made him dizzy, so he immediately resolved to stop).

            "Assok!" cried Argie, her voice strained due to being crushed by puppet arms. Hero noted that despite this being the first time they'd met another monster as outwardly chipper as his guide, the girl had gone surprisingly stiff. "Hi!"

            "What sorta greeting's that?" asked Assok, putting the girl down and patting one of her shoulders. "All I've been through and I getta 'hi'? And whattabout you? Lemme getta look atcha!" The creature of felt and foam held Argie at arms length, taking in the sight of her. "Last I heard you were stealing keys and-" Assok gasped, looking up at the human, as if just realizing his presence. "Is this-?"

            "He's our Hero," said Argie, a hint of pride in her voice that made her Hero puff out his chest and miss the drips of yellow on her casing.

            "Are you really a Hero, Mister?" asked the muppet.

            "So I'm told," replied Hero, tipping his hat to the child.

            "He sure looks the part," said Assok, nodding approvingly. "Much better'n that old one, with all the brass chains and the ripped up pants and-"

            "You've got strings now!" interrupted Argie, reaching for one of her cousin's gloves. "Lemme see!"

            Assok gave her a hand obligingly. "D'ya likem? I gottem at the marketplace."

            "Really?" asked Argie, and though her face was turned downward Hero noted the drips of yellow and cyan as they vanished down the neck of her coat. She turned her cousin's hand over in her own, seeing how the black strings poked all the way through the white gloves, anchored neatly on the palm side with a stitched 'x; "Do they hurt?"

            "Not always," said Assok quickly. "Say, where're you guys headin' next?"

            "Depends, I'm hoping the day lasts long 'nough to go a bit more."

            The Hero looked down at her, his brow creasing in the middle. She'd been more than happy to talk places with most other monsters, but this was the first time she'd shifted the topic to time.

            "You can never tell," nodded Assok. One of his strings tightened, the slack leaving subtly but steadily, nearly imperceptible until it was tugging at one of his boots. "Whep! I've gotta get goin'. Good luck, Cousin, Hero!"

            "Thanks!" said Argie.

            "Yes, thank you," said Hero.

            They waved the muppet off, and Argie's smile stayed plastered to her screen until they were far enough for Hero to ask "You don't trust your own cousin?"

            Her smile faltered and broke, blue leaking down her casing. "Sometimes bad things happen to good monsters," she said quietly. "I wish they didn't, though."

            Worry churned in the pit of his stomach. "And what happened to Assok?"

            "'S kinda like what happened to TOby," explained Argie. "'Cept Assok can still walk."

            Hero had a feeling that he very much did not want to know what had happened to TOby.

            Argie took full advantage of his silence to begin walking along as if nothing had happened. "C'mon! We're almost there, hopefully if we're lucky we'll get through before night falls."

            "Where exactly are we headed?" asked Hero.

            "Halls of Reflection. 'S all about self image, but as long as you know who you are you'll be fine."

            Hero's mind replayed the incident on the lakeshore, the way Argie's words sounded awfully too familiar, but he pursed his lips and decided against mentioning it.

            "Well, I'm sure I'll make it through with your guidance," he assured himself.

            Argie hummed. "Actually..."

            Hero looked down at her with confusion and mild alarm.

            "Well, only you know how you see yourself," she explained, "so everyone has to go through their own hall alone."

            There is was, on the horizon. The way things worked in this world, often times a place seemingly wouldn't exist until you were right upon it, and sure enough within moments of spotting it they were there, standing before the structure.

            It gleamed silver, a complex made entirely out of funhouse mirrors that stretched as far as he could see in either direction. Out of the surface stuck many jagged entrances; many ways in, and assumably (hopefully) there would be the same number of ways out on the other side.

            A maze of mirrors, thought the Hero. What could possibly go wrong?

            "Pick the door that feels best to you," said Argie beside him, returning him to the present. "And just keep going straight. We'll meet up on the other side."

            "You're sure I couldn't pick your path and go with you?" asked the Hero. "Just because, you know, you are a child, and I'm worried about you in a maze all by yourself-"

            There was a pop as the lie appeared at his ankles, and he smiled sheepishly and tried to ignore it. Argie looked at him with a colorful frown.

            "You can do it. Just walk straight and remember," she said the words with grave importance, which sounded quite odd coming from her cartoonishly childish voice. " ** _You are a Hero_**. You can't forget that."

            "Alright," he said, turning to face the maze, nodding slightly. After a second, he turned his head back to her. "And you're not just sending me in to my death, lost wandering around in there till I starve, are you?"

            He imagined if she'd had eyes, she'd be rolling them. "We'll go in at the same time, alright? Go pick a door."

            He took his sweet time doing so, as if by stalling perhaps his guide would change their mind or remember some less frightening way to get wherever it was they were going. Finally he settled on a path, one that to him looked straight enough, though he couldn't see past a point far off in the distance so he couldn't exactly be sure.

            "You ready?" called Argie from her own entrance, some ways to his left.

            "Ready as I'll ever be," he called back. "On three, then?"

            "One!"

            "Two..."

            "Three!"

            She stepped confidently into the maze.

            He waited a moment, just to be sure she wouldn't step back out again, then moved towards where she'd disappeared. Perhaps, if he was silent and careful, he could follow her path and be sure not to get lost (at least, not more lost than she got herself). Unfortunately for him, he couldn't for the life of him distinguish which entrance she'd gone through. Worse yet, when he'd finally given up on that plan, he could no longer find the seemingly straight path he'd picked out for himself previously.

            He paced the line of entrances, looking for a best way in until every path began to look the same, and he couldn't distinguish one from another. He increased his pace, jogging back and fourth around the area he figured his entrance must be, growing panic gnawing at his throat with every unwelcoming opening that passed as he figured Argie must be getting further and further away.

            Grumbling something about being left behind and stupid monster hogwash, he swallowed his fear and stalked into the maze, resolving to just walk with his head down until he got to the other side.

            This method worked surprisingly well, at least at first. Granted, he'd half expected his own reflections to leap out and grab at him upon his first step, so any sort of progress beyond that meant that things were already going better than he'd planned for.

            His own colors were all around him; bright, gaudy blue and red offset with beige, flashes of white and brown and gold. The mirrors themselves were less distorted than he'd originally thought, showing himself as he was instead of carnival recreations, and he found himself looking at his own passing reflections more often than not. He'd always been vain, he figured. Nothing wrong with that, not for a man in his business. Checking himself in reflective surfaces was a habit, and kept shots from being ruined by smudged makeup or ruffled hair or a crooked bowtie.

            He straightened his in the mirror on his right and grinned at the reflection. "Handsome devil," he remarked.

            "You're not half bad, yourself," responded his reflection with a smile of equal caliber.

            He yelped and immediately stalked forward with his head down, picking up his pace. The less time he spent here the better. In fact, the sooner he could get this whole 'Hero' business over with, the sooner he could go back to-

            "To what?" asked the line of reflections to his left. "To overdue bills and termination notices?"

            "To my life," he spat through gritted teeth, turning his head the other way to avoid their gaze. He ended up staring at the reflection directly to his right, who was walking with his head high and cane balanced about his shoulders, wrists hanging over the slatted bamboo.

            "What sort of life was it, really?" asked that version, smiling at him from over his shoulder. "Not really all that much to go back to, if you think hard enough."

            The one in the mirror just behind that one pulled some papers out of his jacket, fluffing them and beginning to read as if he were reciting lines. "To whom it may concern, thank you for your proposal and your interest in recreating vintage films. Unfortunately, there is no current market for a product of that caliber, and we simply cannot continue to make movies that nobody wants to watch. As such, we are declaring your current contract null and void. We wish you luck in your future endeavors and hope that you can find work elsewhere. Sincerely-"

            "Shut up!" he said, rapping his cane on the offending mirror. "It was one job, not the end of the world!"

            "And yet you chose the end of the world over facing the fact that you lost your job," said the one behind him. "I have to say, that's quite the impressive feat of avoidance acrobatics, even for us."

            He took a right and tried to go faster, shrinking under the gazes of so many of himself. He no longer cared to look for which mirror talked at what time.

            "Look, I'm just trying-" he attempted.

            "Trying to what? Be a hero?"

            He scowled. "We all know I'm no hero."

            "Yes, but you're a Hero now. There's a difference."

            "If there is, I'm missing it." He stalked left, holding his hat up as a barrier to a line of smug-looking doppelgangers to his right. The ones on the left chuckled, looking at him from the free angle. The one walking parallel to him used his hat to give him a little wave.

            "It's what you are, not who. What you are is a Hero, and who you are no longer has any meaning to it, not here anyway. Besides, what you are will never match again with who you once were."

            "That doesn't even make sense."

            "Doesn't it?"

            He made a left and a right, followed by another right. The line of mirrors before him on either side bowed dramatically, stating "Hello, I'm the Hero!" as they grinned up at him. He hesitated only a moment and stalked directly through the crowd of them.

            "Look, I get that I'm a dramatic arse, alright? I made a whole career on that, I hardly need to be reminded of that by myself."          

            "How many times have you introduced yourself that way?" asked the multitude, straightening and replacing their straw hats upon their heads. "A dozen so far? Two, perhaps? And it's only been, oh, two days? Are you already so lost?"

            He took five rights in a row that by all laws of physics should have been impossible, and then took the straight path at a four-way junction.

            "Lost, lost," he grumbled. "The only lost I am is lost in this damned maze!"

            "Really now? Always so short-sighted. Where is the man, the human, that you used to be? Is he in here, or did you lose him along the way?"

            "I don't catch your meaning," he said stubbornly.

            One by one, his reflections listed things off as he passed them.

            "Human beings bleed when cut."

            "Human beings need to eat."

            "Human beings need to drink, for that matter."

            "Human beings have names."

            He scoffed. "Alright, the first few are odd, I'll admit, and I've been meaning to ask about them, but of course I have a _name_."

            "Do you, now?" asked a mirror directly before him.

            "Of course I do!" he spat in his own face. "Everyone has a name!"

            The path met at a T, both paths left and right looking equally uninviting. The reflection before him took the opportunity of his hesitation to ask with a sneer "And just what is your name?"

            "It's-"

            He'd meant to spit it out like a curse, like a weapon against the demon in the mirror that wore his face, but nothing came.

            The man blinked, his eyes lowering to the toes of his fake spats.

            His mind was blank. Like somebody had taken an eraser to the part of his brain that stored things that one never forgot, things like his bloody name for Pete's sake!

            It was a fluke, a side-effect of his own anger and worry and this damned maze and-

            He tried again, simply refusing to be proven wrong. "It's- Well, you see, my name is-"

            Oh no.

            Come now, _think_! He was always forgetting the stupidest things at the worst moments, flubbing his lines and forgetting birthdays, but this was serious. He _had_ to remember. There was no way it was just _gone_.

            "I'm-.... I am..."

            "I'm waiting."

            His own voice was grating. He was cruel. He'd always known this as a part of himself, always held it like a knife up his sleeve, the way he could cut with words. How did this remain when something else, something so vital, had gone missing without him even noticing?

            "Just... give me a moment!" he shouted back against the rising panic in his throat. He removed his hat, took a few paces left, then right. Looked behind him, then up at the sky above the great maze. Combed through his mind, trying to find something, anything. He remembered signing autographs but the words vanished from the papers as he attempted to recall them. He could see himself on movie posters but the list of actors was one short. He could remember people calling for him, calling his name, his _name,_ but the words fell away and were lost, as if they'd never been there to begin with.

            "Tell me, Hero," said the man in the mirror. "Who are you?"

            Something broke within him.

            When his voice escaped his lips, it was but a hoarse whisper.

            "I don't know."

            His reflection nodded, content with this answer. The doppelganger motioned to the path to his right, and the Hero took it. His reflections were his own now, walking silent beside him, but perhaps they had always been. Not a single one broke pace or attempted to speak with him as he passed.

            Two turns later and there was the exit, a break in the silver that grew larger and larger until he was out and the air was clear and the looming ever-present claustrophobia of the tight walls was lifted from his shoulders.

            It didn't feel like a victory.

            Argie was there already, waiting for him as she drew shapes in the dirt with a small stick. She leapt to her feet as he stepped out of the maze, dropping her makeshift pencil and her color bar widening into a smile.

            "I knew you could do it!" she cheered. "I got a little worried there because you were taking so long, but I-"

            "We need to talk," he said, and she was silent.


	5. Step 3: Kindness

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Argie and Hero's "talk" goes about as well as expected.

            Yellow replaced green down the red plastic casing, dripping off and vanishing into nothingness. He'd always wondered where it went, as it never seemed to stain her coat on the way down. He almost asked her, but there were more pressing matters at hand, and better questions that needed asking.

            "Right," she said, and he could hear the worry in her voice, trying to hide under a false cheeriness. She had no eyes, but he felt her gaze move past him, back towards the maze where he'd just come. Surely she was putting the pieces together, figuring what might have happened within. "Whaddayou wanna talk about?"

            His knuckles whitened on the bamboo cane in his fist. "How many?"

            "How many what?" she asked, still trying desperately to keep the illusion of a normal conversation. That, more than anything, fueled his rage.

            "You know damn well 'how many what'!" he shouted, and she flinched at the shards of ice in his voice.

            The monster looked away, the facade crumbling. "I... don't keep track."

            "Then guess," he hissed through his teeth.

            She fidgeted, trying to find a way to get around telling a direct lie. "It doesn't matter. They weren't real Heroes, anyway."

            "And how do you figure that?"

            Blue was mixing with yellow, forming a more sickly green than the one on her screen. "They didn't save the world." She looked back up, meeting his gaze as her tone became one of forced hope. "But you will. You've got to!"

            He sneered and her forced smile faltered. Her sleeves connected in front of her and he could imagine her nervous fingers lacing together, as if praying.

            "Why don't I have a name?" he asked.

            She could no longer look at him. She resolved, instead, to focus on the toe of her boot as she dug it into the dusty ground. "I always hate this part..." she whispered, mostly to herself.

            "Well?" he demanded and she flinched.

            She huffed a sigh. "I... it's complicated. You're different when you're here."

            "Different how?"

            "You're not a 'who' anymore. Nobody here's a 'who'. Everyone's a 'what'," she tried.

            "So _what_ am I?"

            She looked up. "You're the Hero."

            He scoffed. "Heroes don't exist."

            She stomped a tiny boot, arms coming to her sides with invisible balled fists. "They do! I know they do!" she insisted. "You're one! You said you were!" Her voice started to break under the pressure. "You have to be!"

            His eyes narrowed as he crossed his arms across his chest. "Why, exactly, do I 'have to be' anything?"

            "Because I need you to save the world!" she shouted.

            The words fell between them. He imagined if a television could cry it was what she was doing now, as fat droplets of blue, red and yellow fell freely from her casing.

            After a moment, he spoke.

            "Heroes aren't real," he explained. His voice was deep and steady, calculated and precise. "They're an unreachable ideal of human perfection that we create to feel better about ourselves as a species. They are fascinating because they are imaginary, the same way monsters are imaginary. Heroes are creatures we create to fill the fantasy worlds we make up to put in books or on the telly for people to waste their time with. Do you know what I really am?"

            She was silent. He continued anyway.

            "I am an Actor. That means that I pretend to be many things, none of which I really am when I go home at the end of the day. I pretend to be a hero because people like to see a hero in the movies, because it makes them think that heroes are real, and it makes them feel like there is some good in this damned world and it makes them forget that every single one of us is going to die cold and alone and the world will keep chugging along to its own untimely end without us."

            "You're lying," said Argie, wiping the bottom of her screen with a sleeve and leaving a long streak of cyan behind. "You're a liar."

            "I am a liar," he admitted, "But what I told you is the truth. Or do you see any lies scuttling about?" He looked down on her with contempt, motioning to the empty space about his feet like a stage magician showing there was nothing up his sleeve.

            She was trying to be strong. God, she was trying so hard that the very effort of it was making her tremble. The sight of it almost made him feel sorry for her, but he still had one more knife to twist.

            "What about you, little 'Argie'? Who were you before you became a what?" His head tilted, his voice soft to hide the cruelty in his words. "Do you even remember anymore?"

            She sank to the ground, burying her face in the knees that she hugged to her chest. Tiny shoulders shook and for a moment he nearly regretted his words. He was struck by how utterly small she was, and could almost see her there as a human child, one with wide eyes and messy hair and too-big boots. What could have caused a child to take the path she had chosen, stealing people from their worlds and leading them to their death with a colorful smile?

            He turned on his heel, examined the horizon appraisingly, and began to walk.

            She lifted her head as he passed. "W-where are you going?"

            "Anywhere without you," he said sharply. "Perhaps if I'm lucky I'll find my own way home."

            "You can't go back," she called after him. "Heroes only go home once they've saved the world."

            "Well, then I suppose it's a good thing I'm not a Hero," he called in return.

            She didn't follow him.

 

*

 

            "Who does she think she is, stealing people from their beds and taking them to God-knows-where on this hairbrained wild goose chase?" he ranted, comforted by the sound of his own voice. "Oh, I'm sorry, _what_ does she think she is?"

            He twirled his cane and stabbed it towards the ground, feeling satisfaction at the resounding THWAK of the solid hit.

            "And what am I meant to do now? Did she even think that through? Oh, saving the world is all well and good, but where's the exit sign on this place? How the devil am I meant to get _back_?!"

            "You left your guide," said a familiar voice.

            The man jumped, nearly dropping his cane. His balled fists came to his sides as he shouted towards the sky "Could everyone please stop interrupting me when I am having a perfectly good conversation with myself?! Especially other versions of myself!" He turned to see the butterfly perched on a stalk of grass. "What do _you_ want?"

            "I've never seen a Hero leave her side before," said the Butterfly, sounding nearly impressed. "You are strange indeed."

            "Thank you, I'll keep that in mind," he said, turning to continue his walk. "Now bugger off."

            "Wh- Hey!" said the Butterfly as the man stalked away. It took off, fluttering at pace beside the human. "Despite your decision to leave, you are not being very wise."

            "Wise? Wise be damned!" he spat. "I'm not wise!" He began counting on his gloved fingers. "I'm not wise, I'm not brave, I'm not honest, I'm not a good person, I'm not a hero, I'm not..." his breath shuddered, his counted fingers curling inward as he lost motivation for his list. "I'm... I'm not anything anymore." He stopped walking, looking down at his feet. "Maybe I never was. Maybe-"

            There was something grey and bulbous sticking out from the bottom of his left pant leg.

            "Oh, for pity's-" he coiled like a spring, frantically ripping the gelatinous worm from his leg. It screeched at him, spittle flying from its tooth-ringed mouth. "Doubt! Of all the unnecessary things to happen today. How long have you even-?"

            He froze. The thing thrashed in his grip, trying and failing to bite at his arm, but his mind was elsewhere. His gaze turned back, towards where he's come, where the maze of mirrors had already vanished beyond his line of sight. The Butterfly flapped in the air above his head.

            He had the feeling that he'd made a terrible mistake.

            He flung the Doubt and started running.

            "Wait!" cried the Butterfly. "This is not her story!"

            But he was gone.


	6. Step 4: Integrity

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> in·teg·ri·ty  
> inˈteɡrədē/  
> noun  
>  1.  
>  the quality of being honest and having strong moral principles; moral uprightness.  
>  2.  
>  the state of being whole and undivided.

"Argie?" he called out, approaching the exit side of the mirror maze. He'd slowed his pace back a small ways, tried to control his breathing so it didn't show that he'd been sprinting moments ago. "I say, Argie? Are you there?"

            There was silence, but for the wind in the grass. He walked along parallel to the structure of mirrors, figuring the child couldn't be far off.

            "Look, I just wanted to- well, I suppose we both know some things got said - on both sides, I should mention - and perhaps I may have acted rashly, though only due to the fact that, well, there was this Doubt, you see, and I'm sure without it I would never have-" He nearly tripped over something that made a sickening sucking sound as his foot hit it, and he leapt back with a yelp.

            It took him several moments to make sense of the child-sized lump of amorphous grey on the ground before him.

            "Oh, hell," he breathed, diving for it and ripping the Doubts off of the girl. "Honestly, I leave for five minutes and this is the state I find you in? What sort of guide goes and gets herself eaten after a mere argument? I mean, have you truly never had a squabble in your- ugh _WHY ARE THESE THINGS SO DISGUSTING?!"_

            The Doubts flew away as they were flung, landing off in the surrounding grass with wet **_SQUELCH_** es and **_THWAP_** s. Finally, he managed to extricate the girl, who lay still on the ground in her best impression of a dead fish. Her red raincoat had gone a sort of translucent clear, and her screen was switched to grey static. He pressed an ear to her chest, wincing at the goopy consistency of her coat, and heard only white noise in the place of a heartbeat. Of course, what had he expected? He removed his ear, lifting one of her arms and dropping it with a **_PLOP_**.

            "I do hope you're not dead," he told her, gaining no response.

            There was a crackle in the grass behind him. He turned to see a creature of black sticks emerge from thin air, pointing its triangular head at him and beginning to hiss.

            "Oh, come _on_ ," he said, scrambling to his feet in a panic. "That's just not _fair_."

            Like at the lake, he immediately set to counting.

            "Six," he breathed. "Six Fears, an unconscious monster, and one cowardly Hero. That's okay. Just... don't be afraid, right?" he swallowed and flexed his fingers, taking a moment to attempt that feat. "Right. That's never going to happen. So. Plan B."

            He knelt, feeling into the girl's pockets for vials. "Dreams. Dreams beat Fears, like scissors beat paper. Don't know what rocks are in this equation, but hopefully one won't show up. I'm sure she won't mind if-"

            Whatever was looming over them was not a Fear. He suddenly wished he'd never bothered to wonder what rocks were, as one just seemed to have arrived to his little party of nightmares.

            It was huge and grey and horrifying, like a tombstone that had magnified itself and stooped with the weight of it's own sadness. Empty, staring eyes poured out a waterfall of tears that flattened the grass beneath it, splattering everywhere.

            He instantly thought that water and himself did not mix. Immediately after that he thought that water and televisions didn't mix, and the thing was moving steadily towards the both of them.

            "Okay. Plan C." He scooped the girl into his arms and grabbed his hat to keep it on his head. "Run."

            He ran, bolting in the opposite direction from the largest of the creatures, the crying stone thing with no name. The fears screeched and made chase, and all thoughts fled his mind except panic and terror and _why won't she wake up_ and run _run **run**_ -

            A doubt squashed beneath his shoe and sent him slipping and falling and tumbling. Argie fell from his arms and rolled ahead of him a ways, laying prone on the grass. He tried to push himself up, tried to get to her and keep going- but he was suddenly and violently pushed down by gallons and gallons of water falling from the looming thing that had caught up far too quickly for a beast of its size.

            He couldn't fight the pressure as salt water filled his eyes, his ears, his mouth- he was choking on it, drowning in it. The Fears were watching him, standing back and letting the larger beast take care of him, and he struggled feebly as oxygen left his brain and he was trying he was _trying_ please stop **_please_** -

            He was going to die. He was dying. He was dying and he could do nothing and-

            There was black.

            The Grief withdrew when the human stopped moving, tears still flowing but no longer engulfing the Hero. A single, curious Fear approached, checking for life. Its razor-sharp beak prodded at the side of the human, poking at the blue coat. The suit was beginning to fade to grey, even black in places, but Fears gave no heed to colors. When there was no movement it circled, looking from the other side at the face that had been turned away.

            Waterlogged hair fell in one of his eyes, but the other was open and staring as a gloved hand came up and grabbed the Fear by its spindly neck.

 

*

 

            _She woke to carnage._

_Hacking and slashing and cutting and ripping._

_The man who looked down at her from over his shoulder was not her Hero. His eyes were wild and dark and different in a way that told her the man she knew was no longer home in his own body._

_She hadn't been aware that humans were capable of that._

_His suit had turned black with the negative emotions that were radiating out from him, their strength consuming his Amour like fuel and amplifying themselves on and on._

_The Fears were screaming, those that hadn't already fled. The Grief was watching, silent and thankfully distant, as the human's Rage and Hate overtook its influence. She knew it had been her own heartbreak that had summoned it, but she felt it debating on whether the sadness of one child was worth confronting the rampaging human._

_It lasted far too long, but was over far too soon. The dead bodies of six Fears were scattered in the grass._

_The man stared the Grief down. It decided there were easier ways to find misery in a world dying and sulked off into the distance. The man watched it go._

_And then he turned to her._

_There was no way to know if he recognized her or not. To him, she was a monster. She'd seen what he had done to monsters._

_He only took two steps before his stride faltered, knees wobbling and pupils dilating. Blackness rushed upward, concentrated but fleeing, trailing skywards and vanishing. He tried for words, failed, and promptly face-planted into the grass at her feet._

_She took a moment to panic before forcing herself to straighten her priorities._

_First: her coat. Doubts had done a number to it, and she stripped off the goopy mess before it itself had a chance to grow teeth. She would miss it, but it was beyond what any of her love could do for it now._

_Second: his jacket. The Hate and Rage had fled him in his unconsciousness, but still they stuck to the jacket, staining the threads black and grey where it had once been blue and red. They must have gotten the most Amour out of the jacket, and as such there was none left to reclaim its space and force the blackness out.  She got it off of him as soon as she could, scared that the negative emotions might seep back into the man if she left it on him in his vulnerable state._

_"Negative," she murmured, holding the black suit jacket up to observe it. She'd never seen an object take on the opposite qualities of Amour before. Whatever had overtaken her Hero, it was beyond what she knew. She dropped the jacket on the ground beside her coat, which was beginning to piece itself off and crawl away._

_She looked up to the darkening sky. Nighttime was coming, and they couldn't stay here, with the mirrors so close and not a tree in sight.  She stepped up onto her prone Hero as a stepstool and scanned the horizon for trees._

_There was only one, far in the distance. Her heart sunk at the sight of the long-dead thing and the place surrounding it, but she had no other choice._

_She tucked her Hero's cane (such a useful thing) through the back of his suspenders and began dragging him across the landscape._

_It wasn't until she was nearly through with her trek that it fully registered that he had come back for her._


	7. Dial

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A new friend, an old friend, and climbing trees.

            The tree loomed above him, lifeless branches mud-grey and ominous.

            He couldn't for the life of him recall how he'd gotten there. Thinking back to try to piece the story together only made the picture he tried to form in his head fuzzier, choked with black and pain and a dull, throbbing anxiety.

            His head throbbed with a migraine that wouldn't subside. His guide, coatless and tiny in what appeared to be yellow pajamas, let out white-noise snores on the ground beside him. His own jacket was nowhere to be seen, and he reminded himself to ask her about it whenever she woke. He also reminded himself to tell her to stop dragging him around while he was unconscious, as he discovered grass and mud stains all down his back, and his pants were ripped in several places where he'd apparently snagged during the journey.

            The place where they'd settled was a mess of forest green and muddy brown. They appeared to be on a dry patch of ground, which was rare in this place if he could tell anything by his immediate surroundings. Thick brown mud bubbled up around twisting vines, which tangled together into a weaving web that reached up towards the sky, blotting out any direct sunlight. The tree they were under was formidable, perhaps the largest tree he'd ever seen in person, but even it couldn't reach up to break through the canopy.

            He sat against the trunk of the tree and huffed a sigh, looking out upon the bleary horizon at mud and guck as far as he could see. "What a mess I've gotten dragged into."

            His eye caught on something brass by his leg, and shifted to see a small, old fashioned radio microphone. It was one of the round ones, with four coils leading inward to the center mesh, a spindly stand and the glowing words "ON AIR" crowning the circular mechanism. It leaned back, the thin stand bending so it could peer up at him.

            "And what are you meant to be?" he asked the thing, looking down at it. "You don't look like a monster. Heck, you don't even have a cord or a dial-"

            "DIAL," it repeated, his own voice echoed and distorted, so that it sounded as if he were being broadcast out on an old radio.

            "Dial, mm?" asked the Hero. "Is that what you call yourself?"

            "CALL MM-E," said the microphone, splicing pieces of the man's words. "DIAL."

            "That's a funny way to communicate," said Hero. "I'm assuming you can only repeat what others say, yes?"

            "YES?" it parroted in the same tone as Hero.

            "Well," sighed the man, cupping his chin in his hands. "So much for an intellectual conversation."

            "SO MUCH FOR AN INTELLECTUAL," repeated Dial.

            Hero bristled. "Excuse me?"

            "THAT'S A FUNNY WAY TO - CALL YOURSELF."

            "I'll have you know I do consider myself an intellectual on things that actually make sense! Unlike this topsy-turvy world, where microphones talk and tellys wear boots and you wake up lost in some stupid bog!" he motioned at their surroundings in frustration.

            "STUPID BOG!" agreed Dial.

            "And I'm not even sure of the way out-"

            "NOT - SURE."

            "-and regardless I can't just leave her here-"

            "LEAVE HER."

            "But perhaps if I could get a better view, I-" he leaned his head back and stared up the trunk of the great tree.

            The tree...

            "BETTER VIEW," parroted the thing.

            "Perhaps," considered Hero. He stood, turning to face the tree and look for a good way up. "Heaven knows it's been years since I've climbed trees. You stay here, won't you Dial? I figure a creature with no arms or legs is not the best at climbing."

            "NOT THE BEST - CLIMBING - TREES," said Dial as Hero began to make his way up. "STAY HERE."

            The microphone's voice (or, rather, his own voice coming from the microphone) faded as he climbed, the tree providing many hand and footholds. It was actually quite a breeze to make it up, and even the highest branches supported his weight well.

            He looked out upon the landscape and his heart fell. As far as he could see there was nothing but mud and vines and thorns. He looked up, trying to spot the sky through the canopy, but the layers of green were so tightly woven that only refracted light made it through, giving no actual glimpse of the world outside.

            "It could have ended already for all we know," the Hero muttered. "Where the devil are we?"

           

*

 

            On the ground below, the tiny guide twitched, her screen whirring to life and her ears twitching as her mind sharpened.

            It had been a long trek through treacherous territory the night before, the wet ground threatening to eat at her through her boots, dripping vines forcing her dangerously close to areas of deep water or quicksand that would swallow her and her charge up before they had the chance to scream. Not that her human would have been awake to scream, as he remained unhelpfully unconscious for the entire trek, forcing her to struggle with his dead weight through the dangerous ground. When she'd found the dry spot beneath the tree she'd finally taken the chance to break, to let hot cyan drips of crying frustration run down her casing for the man she'd thought was a Hero, for the repeated delays while Hate could be breathing down their necks, for the saving of the world that might never come to pass. And then she'd slept, because one must always sleep at night, or risk the dangers that came with staying up too late.

            She turned to where she'd left her Hero and found him gone. There was a part of her that wasn't surprised, and when she looked for him her eyes went out on the horizon, hoping that she wouldn't see a familiar straw hat atop a patch of quicksand.

            "Hope he didn't run off," she said quietly. "He'll get himself killed in the Mire."

            "GET HIMSELF KILLED," said her own voice from beside her, tinnier than normal.

            She looked down to see the small microphone looking up at her.

            "Oh," she said. "Hello again."

            "HELLO AGAIN," it repeated.

            "How've you been? 'S been a while."

            "BEEN A WHILE," it agreed.

            "You haven't seen my Hero, have you-?" she trailed off, realizing what she was asking, and who she was asking it of.

            "DIAL," it said, in her Hero's voice.

            "Dial?" she said, confused. "Oh, is that your name now?"

            "WHAT YOU CALL YOURSELF," it confirmed.

            "You've got his voice," said Argie. "So you've seen him, then? Do you know where he went?"

            "TOPSY-TURVY," said Dial, bending backwards to look up at the tree. "CLIMBING TREES."

            Argie followed his gaze, and sure enough there was her Hero, looking out upon the landscape from the highest branches. "Oh. That can't be safe."

            "GET HIMSELF KILLED," agreed Dial.

            She fiddled with some buttons at the bottom of her front panel, increasing her volume to the max.

            "WHY'RE YOU ALL THE WAY UP THERE?" she called, her voice booming about the place.

            Her Hero jumped, nearly dislodged himself, and somehow just managed to keep his balance before looking down at her. He seemed to immediately regret this as his grip on the tree tightened, his knuckles popping out from under the fabric of his gloves enough that she could see it from her vantage point on the gound.

            "I'm getting a better view!" he called.

            "WELL, COME DOWN!" she shouted.

            "COME DOWN!" parroted Dial.

            There was a hesitation. "No!"

            "WHAT DO YOU MEAN, NO?"

            "I'm much better off in this tree than I am with some silly child!" he yelled.

            "NO YOU'RE NOT," she called back, red splattering from her screen. She paused a moment, thinking. "ARE YOU JUST TOO SCARED TO CLIMB DOWN?"

            Another pause. A quieter "No."

            The lie squealed on its way down, landing in the mud with a wet PLOP.

            "That means nothing," called the Hero.

            Argie sighed, clicking her buttons to lower her volume again. "Alright." she looked down at Dial. "D'ya wanna go get him?"

            "GO GET HIM," said Dial.

            She picked up the microphone, placing it a bit precariously on her shoulder. It leaned against the side of her telly-head for support, producing a not-inconsiderable amount of feedback that made the girl flinch, gritting her non-existent teeth as she began to climb.


	8. Mire and Mirth

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's never good to laugh at another's expense.

            "Of course she's coming up here," Hero mumbled to himself, watching the girl climb as a way to distract from his own vertigo. "Because the only thing better than one idiot in a tree is two." He leaned over to shout down at her. "You'll get stuck!"

            She looked up, her boot placed in a forking branch. "No I won't!"

            This pause, however, caused her to put more weight than she'd meant to onto her right hand, which was placed on a particularly thin branch. It creaked and snapped, and the girl tumbled backward, the ankle of her boot slipping forward and becoming wedged in the forked branch, stopping her from plummeting too far. The poor microphone that had been on her shoulder fell past her, landing on a branch just below. She kicked and wiggled and twisted, upside-down, until eventually she just hung there, swinging gently.

            "Hero?" she called.

            "Yes?"

            "...I'm stuck," she called after a moment.

            "STUCK," repeated Dial, trying to right himself on the lower branch by using his own face to push himself upright.

            The Hero sighed. "Alright, stay there. I'll come get you."

            "I'm not going anywhere," she said, dangling idly.

            He made his treacherous way down, immediately regretting his promise of rescue as he realized it meant having to navigate the tree. Handholds and footholds were chosen carefully, meticulously, lest he slip on the caked-on mud and fall to his own doom in rescuing her. As he got closer, he could observe the upside-down child. She had her free left leg tucked behind her right, and her mouth had gone very small despite the colorful rivulets that were now dripping their way down the glass of her screen.

            She reached out her arms for him as he made his way over (at least, he thought she did, it was much harder to tell now that she only had short sleeves to indicate the positions of the invisible limbs), and he was about to reach back when he paused, then lowered his hands to his sides.

            Her head tilted. "Hero? Won't you help me down?"

            "No."

            "What d'you mean, 'no'?" she said, distressed yellow running up her face.

            "I won't let you down until _you_ promise to return me home," he said.

            " _What_?!"

            "WHAT?!" squawked Dial from below.

            Hero crossed his arms. "You heard me."

            Dial began hopping back and fourth on the lower branch, repeating "RETURN HOME RETURN HOME" to himself. Hero had the feeling the thing was laughing, or would have been if it had had the sounds.

            "You're being a butt," Argie said, trying to bend up and reach for her own foot. She wiggled for a few moments, realized the futility of the action, and flopped back down with a huff.

            "Well?" said the Hero, leaning against another branch to watch her efforts. "It's a simple 'yes' or 'no'."

            "It's not that easy!" she said.

            "Isn't it? We just backtrack. First step is to get out of-" Hero gave a vague wave at their surroundings. "well, where-ever it is that we currently are."

            "The Mire," supplied Argie.

            "The Mire?" he considered. "That's... to the point."

            "Well, some people call it 'The Endless Mire', but 'The Mire's just shorter."

            "Endless?" asked Hero. "Why must everything here be endless? Surely if a thing has a beginning it must have an end somewhere, or else it would just never begin to begin with."

            "I s'pose," said Argie, her voice indicating that she very much did not care for his analysis. He continued anyway.

            "To be truly endless a thing would just go on forever, and so we'd never know what it was to not be in it. Like the universe - it would just encompass everyone and everything, from the beginning to the end of time. It wouldn't need a name because it would just _be_ everything, and you can't have a name for a lack of something that's never lacking. And if a thing's not really endless, then why call it such? Why not 'the really really really enormously huge' Mire or the 'very very massively unfathomable' Deep?"

            "I think 'endless' just sounds better."

            "What it sounds like is lazy writing," said Hero. "They should really let me name these sorts of things, I'd do a much better job at it."

            "Hero, can you _please_ lemme down now?" asked Argie, sounding pathetic. "All the blood's running to my head."

            "You're a telly, you haven't got any blood."

            "Uggghhhhhh" she groaned. "Why of all the heroes in the world did I have to get stuck with you?"

            "Excuse me, but I don't believe I was the one who specifically plucked me from my bed one night. You could've gone and chosen someone else."

            Her colors came together in a pursed scowl. "Maybe then I wouldn't have picked such a weenie."

            He bristled. "And I wouldn't be stuck with a brat like you!"

            "Doo-doo-head!"

            "Guttersnipe!"

            "Codfish!"

            "Ingrate!"

            "Loser!"

            "Weasel!"

            "Poopface!"

            "Riffraff!"

            "Bully!"

            "Insect!"

            She tried to shout something, but it came out as an elongated BLEEEP.

            His next insult died on his tongue as his brows furrowed. "What the devil was that?"

            She groaned in annoyance. "Parental controls."

            He blinked. After a moment he burst out laughing.

            "What?!" she asked indignantly.

            "A monster with parental controls!" he howled. "Jesus! Do you still have a bedtime? No cartoons after eight? Do you have any blocked channels?"

            "It's not _my_ fault I'm a kid," pouted Argie.

            "NOT A KID," supplied Dial from below. "WEENIEFISH."

            Hero wheezed, doubling over with laughter. Even Argie let out a snort at Dial's impromptu insult, despite the fact that it was at her expense.

            Dial seemed to consider their laughter before spitting out "POOPWEASEL."

            This incited an entirely new round of hooting laughs from Hero and some rapid-fire giggles from his guide. Hero gasped for breath, blotting at his eyes with the palm of his glove.

            "Hoo!" he tried between laughs, "I have a feeling he doesn't like you, much."

            "Prob'ly not," agreed Argie, looking down (up?) at the microphone, which let out a stunted-sounding raspberry at her. "I wonder what Dial thinks about you?"

            Dial's stem kinked in a head tilt as it considered this. Eventually, it settled on "LOSERBRAT."

            Hero's laughs stopped in their track, taken over by Argie's own peals of laughter. He looked down at the brass microphone, a look of pure betrayal on his face.

            "Dial," he said, hurt. "I thought we were friends."

            "DEVILFRIEND," he replied. "ENDLESS BUTTHEAD."

            Argie squealed, green running freely up her screen, splattering down on the mic below and further, little green specks splattering the muddy ground below Hero watched them fall, marveling at how he could still see the colors even from so high up.

            He also marveled at how some of them seemed to be twisting and moving and perhaps even coming closer.

            The television let out a shriek as her laughter intensified, and the sound of her apparent joy alone made Hero chuckle as he looked back at her. "Come now, surely it's not _that_ funny-"

            There was something green and tangled worming its way under her shirt.

            At first he took it for easter grass, sparkling and kinked and green, that had formed itself into an autonomous cluster. As he watched, however, it bared needle-sharp teeth and bit, and Argie let out a shout that devolved into her upside-down form nearly doubling up with hooting laughter.

            Before he could find a way to properly respond to that there was a tickle against one of his ankles. He looked down to see another one of the creatures nuzzling the space between his slacks and his spats. The feeling it gave the exposed skin was odd, a kind of tickle-numb that reminded him of when a limb fell asleep, and he couldn't help a giggle.

            It bit him and warmth rushed up his leg from the spot and it was the funniest thing that had ever happened to him. He howled, burying his face in the crook of his arm and slapping at the branch beside him with his free hand. His laughter from earlier, as wild as it had been, was nothing compared to this as the entire world became a joke. The sheer ridiculousness of everything crashed into him all at once and he was laughing and he was laughing and oh god he could not stop _laughing_.

            Argie so far gone that she was shaking the branch she was suspended on, sending her bobbing up and down with each guffaw and peal. Through her hysteria she seemed to be shouting something.

            "Wh- AHAHAHA- What?" Hero just barely managed, swallowing his merriment for only a moment before he snorted and fell back into it, tears streaming from his eyes and making the world around him blurry.

            "Mirth!" she squealed. "They- HAHAHAH- They're Mirth!"

            "I can tell!" shouted Hero, giving her a slap on the shoulder that sent her swinging wildly. "I HA-HA-haven't been this happy in- Ohoho- in _years_!"

            She shook her head, still laughing. "No! WE-EHEHEHEHE - We'll die laughing!"

            That became the new funniest thing he'd ever heard and he bent himself over a branch to howl. His sides were already beginning to ache, his lungs screaming as he tried to get air in through the laughs that wouldn't stop, that couldn't stop, but he didn't care, _couldn't_ care...

            He pried his eyes open against the pressure of his own Cheshire grin and noted that the ground seemed awfully further away than it had been moments ago. Also that the tree branch beneath him seemed to be much greener below the thick layer of mud on the wood that was flaking off as he watched, making a patchwork pattern of bold chartreuse. He threw his head back even as his ribs ached against the continuous laughs and saw the canopy, the twisting, spiking vines growing closer by the second, and looking more and more threatening as the distance was breached.

            He dived for Hero, her foot coming free with a POP and they tumbled and landed in a wider fork, further down and slightly more protected by the outermost branches from the incoming canopy of thorns. She shook in his arms, laughter splattering green from her screen onto the front of his shirt, but he himself was laughing too hard to care as he gripped the girl tight and braced as much as his spasming body could for the imminent impact.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to Emptyspaaace for helping me with what Mirths were and essentially getting me out of the plot rut of how to end the chapter/move the story forward. Ilu friend you're the best.


	9. Elastic

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Fallen Heroes and Tea Parties.

            From above, the Mire was tangled red and green as far as anyone's eyes could see. Even those who could soar above on wings of candy floss or cotton would admit that their eagle-eyed view was not enough to see the Mire in its entirety.

            If anyone were watching, they'd see a bulge, like a pimple, in the top of the great interwoven tapestry of thorned vines. It swelled, with deep green straining against the lighter chartreuse below that glowed violently through the growing cracks. The canopy let out a series of sharp SNAPs that increased in frequency until finally something broke through. It was a rather large, tree-shaped something that was beginning to twist and spin and glow yellow beneath the green which was getting too bright to look at directly.

            Hero splayed out, the tree warming against his back. Still his body shook with laughter he could not control, his ribs heaving and aching as he tried to gasp for breath, tried to fight the lightheaddedness and the pain in his sides and tried not to find everything as hilarious as whatever was on his leg was making him think. His vision was blurred by the tears that wouldn't stop running down his cheeks, but he could make out the blue of the sky and knew that they were, in fact, past the canopy, and the rushing of wind in his ears told him that they were moving very fast.

            Brass and red entered his view of blue and green and he heard the distorted, shouting voices of himself and his guide. "GET YOURSELF KILLED! STOP STOP STUCK NOT FUNNY NOT FUNNY!"

            "I kno-OHOHO-w!" managed Hero using up precious air that was getting harder and harder to gasp in between fits. "Can't! stop! Laughing!"

            "STOP STOP STOP!"

            Hero squeezed his eyes shut and clenched at his sides as his silent spasms bent him over double. From what he could hear, Argie couldn't stop her laugh-attack either. She'd been at it slightly longer than him, and he had to wonder if either of them would make it out of this.

            There was the sudden, piercing screech of microphone feedback. Hero's clenching fists moved from his sides to his ears as he cried out, pain leeching the Mirth from his body as his teeth grit against the noise. The warm tingly tangly thing at his ankle withdrew its teeth and let out a whimper, and he immediately took the opportunity to kick it away, watching it tumble through the branches and just barely escape falling to its doom by biting into the tree itself, sending a fresh wave of green through the bark.

            Argie was scratching at her own, more stubborn Mirth, and Hero quickly set to helping her tear it away. It coiled around his fingers and bared its teeth but he shook it so violently that he flung it off to where he hoped it wouldn't come crawling back anytime soon. He helped the girl to sit up as Dial's feedback ceased and the mic hopped over.

            "You alright?" he asked, the very act of talking making his sore diaphragm ache.

            "ALRIGHT? ALRIGHT?" asked Dial in Hero's own worried tone.

            She nodded, taking just a moment to breathe (did tellys breathe? he wasn't sure, but she needed the time regardless). Seemingly composed, the girl pulled herself up to her feet and made her way, shaky but as fast as she could manage, to where she could see over the edge of where they'd landed when Hero had tackled her. She leaned over the edge, hanging on one of the branches for support.

            "Oh no," she said.

            "Oh no?" asked Hero.

            "OH NO," repeated Dial.

            "We gotta get off," she said, looking back at her Hero so he could see the yellow and magenta dripping from her casing. "Now!"

            "I'm assuming that means we're high up," said Hero, wanting very much to stay where he was and not see how far they were from the ground. Regardless, the radiating heat of the tree was beginning to get uncomfortably sweltering, and if Argie was saying they should make their dismount he was inclined to agree with her. He scooped Dial up and headed towards her.

            "Very," she agreed, still gazing over the edge. "And only getting higher. I think that's the Elastic Valley way down there..."

            He approached the edge carefully, leaning forward to peer over.

            "Ooooothat's a very long way...." he said, his vision spinning and feet rooting to his spot. He reached over and placed Dial atop Argie's head so his shaking hands wouldn't accidentally drop him. "How exactly do you suppose we are to get down?"

            "Sorry," was all she said.

            And then there were two small points of pressure on his lower back and he was falling and tumbling and screaming.

 

*

 

            It was a very uneventful morning for TOby. News had gotten around that the Ferry was no longer in service, so there was no real reason for any monsters to visit his book shelf anymore. He hadn't seen anyone since Argie and her Hero, in fact, and though he was glad for the quiet, he also tried not to think of how long it would be until he got any other visitors.

            Luckily, TOby was no stranger to having conversations without a partner.

            Unluckily, he'd run plumb out of things to talk about, having spent the whole of yesterday complaining to himself about the tiny television monster and her Hero, and seeing as nothing had happened since then aside from falling asleep and waking up still upright, he just sat in silence and contemplated autonomous motion.

            This silence was perturbed by a far off yell.

            It faded in from nothing, getting steadily closer. His eyes flickered left, then right in their sockets, trying to make the most of his limited peripheral sight to see who the devil was running at him while screaming like a banshee. As the noise got louder still he realized that the source of it wasn't from either side, but from above.

            His eyes rolled upwards just in time to see a blur of white, tan and gold plummet past him, screaming madly and flailing for all he had. He rushed by in an instant, barely enough time for TOby to shriek "WHAT THE SHIT?!" before he was gone and the screaming was getting quieter again as the man fell headfirst into the Endless Deep.

            His plummet had been so close to the edge of TOby's shelf that the wind of the near-miss caused TOby to rock forward, then back, losing the fragile balance that he had.

            "Oh no, oh nonono!" he cried, but it was too late and he THUNKed over backwards, facing the sky. His dry comment on his new position was lost as his view revealed the tangled green something moving across the sky like a rocket, higher and higher still and growing brighter as he watched.

            "Holy hell," he said. "Is that-?"

            He got his answer at the thing promptly burst into flames, yellow overtaking green as one fifth of the sun brightened the sky, warming his skyward face.

            He would have blinked at it if his eyelids allowed him the luxury. All he could do was stare at the thing and ponder both it, the falling Hero, and his own unfortunate happenstance.  

            "Well," he said finally. "Looks like those idiots have been busy."

 

*

 

            He expected himself to go out with a SPLAT. He'd certainly had enough time to think about it on the way down, seeing as he was falling for far, far longer than what seemed possible. When the ground rushed up into view it was almost a relief, as at least he'd be putting an end to the blind terror of falling endlessly.

            What he definitely did not expect was for the ground to give way beneath him, form-fitting around him at the sides and stretching like rubber, before springing back up and sending him skyward again.

            Hero realized quickly that whatever was currently happening was much, much worse than a quick splat.

            He reached the zenith and began to plummet again. He still hadn't stopped screaming.

            It was much easier to just cover his eyes and pray for it all to stop.

            "I say, is that what you call table manners?" gurgled an unfamiliar voice.

            He swallowed his own screams, chancing a peek through his gloved fingers at whoever had addressed him in so calm a manner at so un-calm a time.

            He in no way expected to see the blubbering frog in a 18th century getup and the bored-looking gryphon who sat across a floating tea-table from him. Wind whipped at the tablecloth (held down by three full teacups and a flowered teapot) and at the bullfrog's waistcoat (held down by the bullfrog's arms), but the other diners paid no mind to their rapid descent and instead seemed content to stare at Hero rather reproachfully, as if he'd just let out a belch at a fancy dinner.

            "Table manners?" Hero sputtered. "Who could think of table manners at a time like this!" He chanced a look down and saw the ground rapidly approaching again, and he squeezed his eyes shut and pulled his legs in, bracing again for impact. The entire party - toad, gryphon, table and hero - sank into the elastic surface and slingshotted back up, every one and thing except the Hero remaining unperturbed.

            "Well, when one joins a party uninvited it is usually good to be polite about it," said the gryphon in a scratchy voice. "You're just lucky we have a spare teacup."

            "I don't want any tea!" Hero cried. "I just want to stop this infernal bouncing!"

            "Well you're in the entirely wrong place for that," commented the bullfrog. "Bouncing is about all that happens here, aside from our own tea-party and whatever anyone else wishes to get themselves up to."

            "Yes, one can't be expected to know everything that goes on here," agreed the gryphon. "But it can be assumed that it is mostly bouncing."

            "Is there any way to avoid it?" asked the Hero, his stomach doing summersaults as they again reached the apex and accelerated back down

            "Well, I'd suggest you go elsewhere," the frog suggested, taking his teacup from the table and sipping with his wide mouth. "If you do not wish to bounce then you should not stay in a place where you can only bounce."

            "How do I leave?" Hero asked desperately.

            "That depends on where you're going," said the gryphon.

            Hero took the time it took to sink and spring again to think of where it was exactly he wanted to go.

            "Well," he said. "I'd very much like to go home, but I don't think I could find my way without my guide-" his eyes widened and he spun, looking around the vast landscape for a familiar hint of red and black. "Oh, bugger, I've entirely lost my guide! You two haven't seen her, have you? She's a small girl-"

            "I haven't seen a girl since that one who'd lost her inbetween," said the bullfrog.

            "That's an odd way of putting it," Hero said, thinking about Argie's invisible limbs. "Do you know where she is?"

            "She went off to There," said the gryphon, "But There is a long way from Here, and a longer way from the Elastic Valley, and its hardly even certain she made it There to begin with."

            Hero groaned, entirely too frazzled to even think of keeping up with their nonsense logic. "None of that helps me at all."

            "If she's as lost as you claim," said the bullfrog, "there's only one place she could be."

            "Where?" asked Hero, hopeful for an actual answer.

            "Well, where all lost things go," he pointed a rubbery finger towards the horizon. "Lost and Found."

            "How do I get there?" asked Hero.

            "You'll have to bounce," said the griffon. "Until the ground hardens and you leave the valley. Then you'll be Lost, and if you continue on you'll find Found. Just be careful not to stay Lost for too long, or you may never find your way out until someone makes you Found."

            Hero looked in the direction that had been indicated by the frog, contemplating. The instructions were still nonsense in his mind, but they were better than anything he supposed he'd get otherwise, and he certainly couldn't bring himself to stay where he was.

            "Alright," he said, nodding. "I'll head there, then.

            "I think you mean Lost, When," corrected the bullfrog. "It won't do you good to go There, Then."

            Hero forced a smile, pretending to understand. "Right. Thanks."

            He looked down, calculated when he'd meet with the ground again, tucked his legs, and at the right moment he pushed off, springing towards his destination at an alarming pace. The bullfrog and griffon watched him go, seeing him flail and flounder and eventually find some kind of rhythm as he bounced further and further away.

            "He didn't even try any tea," commented the bullfrog, eying the man's abandoned full cup.

            "Rude," said the griffon, and they turned inwards to continue their party.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Shamelessly featuring Gurgle and Scratch from one of Mod's short stories, Ethel. Their story can be found here: http://thepropertyofhate.com/ShortStories/Ethel:%20Chapter%202


	10. Lost and Found

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Old man gets lost, yells at clouds.

            Bouncing was definitely the least favorite mode of travel Hero had ever experienced, and he liked to think that he'd experienced many (including the underground rail systems of multiple countries). His stomach had eventually stopped turning, which he was thankful for due mostly to the fact that him becoming sick while airborne over what was essentially an enormous trampoline was probably the best way to make his situation infinitely worse.

            It had been his plan to double-check his directions with the first monster he encountered, but his path was barren, with not a soul in sight. He had time, then, to ponder things, and especially to look up at the burning ball in the sky, the one that had somehow not been there before.

            He wondered why he'd never noticed the lack of a sun. There had been days, yes, so much different than the darkened nights, but he couldn't for the life of him remember seeing a sun in the sky, or feeling the warm rays upon him like he did now. But how did a sky become bright with no sun? What told the days from the nights? And moreover- why had the new sun been a tree to begin with? Were all trees merely stars in waiting, eventually to be uprooted and float into the sky to ignite? His questions kept running over and colliding with one another in his head as he tried to answer them with his own logic and ended up more confused than he began. As a way to stop the vicious cycle, he tried to make notes of all his questions and file them away for Argie to answer once he found her.

            If he found her, he thought. And if she hadn't still been on the sun when it had burst into flames.

            The ground beneath him gave significantly less, and he found his bounces becoming shallower and shallower. Eventually his heel hit solid ground and he stumbled forward a few steps, trying to regain his mastery over traversing a surface that wasn't made entirely of rubber. His first steps were shaky, but he eventually managed to rid himself of his sea-legs (elastic-legs?) and he continued forward.

            The landscape had become more and more washed out around him as he went, even the bright sky fading to a dull grey, like rainclouds hanging above. He also failed to notice the fog curling around him until it was too thick to see much of anything. Not that there had been much to see to begin with, but the sudden loss of visibility (and worse, the realization that he didn't know exactly _when_ he'd lost it) caused anxiety to churn is his gut as his pace faltered. He debated if he should move faster in the hopes of getting out of whatever grayscale place he'd found himself in, or if he should watch his steps more carefully in case he stumbled upon some form of obstacle in the fog.

            He went with the latter, knowing from experience just how quickly one could run into trouble in this world, taking his time and trying to peer through the haze as he went.

            He walked. And walked. And continued to walk. Any sound from his footfalls were swallowed by the fog, leaving an eerie quiet that unnerved him greatly. He hoped that he had continued his straight path and not accidentally changed his angle somewhere, wondering when it was he'd get where he was meant to be going.

            "What was it they said?" he pondered aloud, just to hear his own voice and assure himself that he was still alive in the sea of nothingness. "Bounce until you cannot, and then... what? Get lost?" He gave a humorless laugh. "Well, if I've ever been lost, I certainly am now."

            The silence at the end of his sentence was enough to reveal a faint scratching, like dishes scraping together when one was replaced in a cabinet. It was quiet, a barely-there sort of noise that vanished as soon as he noticed it, but still it made the Hero stop dead in his tracks, his ears alert for another sign of it.

            He dared not breathe. The fog was silent around him, curling idly in a wind he could not feel. The sound did not return.

            "Bloody typical," he mumbled. "Leave me alone for five minutes and I'm already hearing things."

            He started up again, a bit faster than before.

            "Of course, though, why not?" he asked himself, filling the immediate silence. "I've always been a coward. Failed to mention that in the mirrors, but perhaps it didn't need saying? Those boys at school used to always tease me for it, say I'd be a shoe-in for the cowardly lion if we ever put on a production of Oz. Jokes on them, though, I got to be the scarecrow. Granted, it's not much better. Still got 'scare' in the name, after all. Goodness, they used to have some sort of rhyme or something... schoolboys always do, don't they? What was it...? Blast, it had something to do with my name, didn't it? Which would make remembering the rhyme easier if I still bloody had it!" He shouted the last few words into the fog, hoping perhaps vainly for an echo but receiving none as the mist swallowed his frustration.

            There was definitely a scratching noise from behind him.

            He whirled, wielding his cane like the world's most underwhelming sword. "Who's there?" he barked. "I'm warning you, I'm armed!"

            There was silence. A second ticked by, then two. Hero was beginning to feel the heat of embarrassment upon his face about yelling at clouds when a delicate voice came from the mist.

            "Are you lost?" asked the voice of a child.

            The Hero lowered his cane, squinting at the place the voice had come from and seeing nothing but swirling grey. "I... suppose I am."

            "That's sad. It's always much harder when a whole person gets lost. Especially when they need to find themselves to get found."

            "I suppose," said Hero. "Sorry, but, aren't you lost? Seeing as you're here, same as I am."

            "No," she said. "I'm just looking for something I have lost. There's a difference."

            He gave up trying to pierce the fog with his eyes alone, but wariness kept his feet rooted where they were, refusing to step off his path to find the source of the mysterious voice. "Sorry, but I get a bit anxious when I don't know who I'm speaking with. Who, and, ah, where, are you, exactly?"

            There was a pause and for a moment he thought she might have gone, but then there were a few thin scratches and a porcelain doll emerged from the fog.

            She was antique, he could tell. He'd seen dolls like her sitting on shelves in the homes of old ladies who had far too many hand-painted tea saucers that never got taken from their china cabinets. Brown hair was held back from her sculpted face by a blue ribbon which matched her eyes, and the legs that poked out from the bottom of her fluffed dress were spiderwebbed with hairline cracks. Every movement elicited the soft scratch of porcelain-on-porcelain from her old joints. When she spoke, her face remained static, the uncanny nature of it sending a shiver up Hero's spine.

            "I'm L-ah," she said. "And I am here."

            "Ella?" he asked. "That's a very pretty name."

            "Thank you, but it's L-ah."

            He tried and failed to hear the distinction, but nodded regardless.

            She seemed to sense his struggle and offered a bit of mercy. "You were closer than a lot of people, though. What's your name?"

            "Well," said Hero. "I'm called 'Hero', mostly, but I've lost my real name somewhere."

            "That's okay. People lose all sorts of things. A lot of them wind up here." She bent at the hip, reaching her arms down towards the ground. She emerged from the fog with a tattered book in one hand and a rusted nail clipper in the other. "See?"

            Hero blinked, looking towards his feet. The fog was so thick that he couldn't even see his shoes, and he wondered how many lost things he'd trodden over in his walk. "I say," he marveled.

            "So who lost you?" asked L-ah, carefully replacing the objects where she'd found them and straightening, brushing her dress as if to remove dirt from it. "Or did you lose yourself?"

            "I'm not sure," Hero answered. "I lost track of my guide, so I suppose by extension she lost me, too, but perhaps I was lost to begin with?" He groaned, scratching at his curled hair. "It's all so confusing. Nothing here makes any sense!"

            She seemed to consider this. "Or perhaps," she said. "It does make sense, but not a sense you're used to things making?"

            He sighed. "Either way, I'm not sure of anything anymore, so I might as well have lost my sanity."

            "I can't help you there, but perhaps I could help you find your guide. If she's lost too she must be somewhere here, and once we find her you'll both be found together."

            "I would like that," said Hero. "I'm not very fond of being lost."

            "Nobody ever is," said L-ah, moving beside him. "Shall we?"

            They walked side-by-side through the fog. His pace had to be adjusted, as the girl was only two feet tall and porcelain legs did not make for a fast gait. As they went, the girl upheld their conversation, and he was so very glad for the noise and the company that he didn't even mind her onslaught of questions.

            "So when did you lose your guide?"

            "Not terribly long ago, perhaps a few hours."

            "How did you lose each other?"

            "Well, you see, we were up a tree, and then she pushed me-"

            "Why'd she do that?"

            "I believe she was very much aware that the tree was about to catch fire."

            "And why were you up a tree that was about to be on fire?"

            "Well when I climbed it I didn't _know_ it would catch fire."

            "Why'd you climb it to begin with?"

            "Because I wanted to know where I was."

            "And where were you?"

            "In the Mire, but I found that out because Argie told me, not because I climbed the tree."

            "You came here all the way from the Mire?" asked L-ah, shocked. "You really are lost."

            "Yes, about that," Hero asked, waving his cane and stirring up the fog beside him. "This is the place where lost things go, yes?"

            "Uh-huh," nodded L-ah with a scratching noise.

            "So, if I lost my name, mightn't it be here, somewhere?"

            She shook her head and Hero felt his optimism deflate. "Not exactly. Some stuff stays where you left it. I believe names are like that. I'm sure if you ever go back to where and who you were when you lost it, you'll find it right where you left it."

            He hummed, considering this. "And what about what you've lost?"

            "What about it?"

            "Well, for starters, what is it?"

            The girl was quiet for a moment, and Hero wondered if it was the wrong question to ask. He was about to backtrack when she answered.

            "I don't know."

            "You don't?" Hero raised his eyebrows. "Then how do you know what to look for?"

            "Well, I don't, really," she said. "But I'm certain I'll know when I find it."

            Hero laughed. "I'd argue that logic, but it's essentially the best I can hope for in finding myself again."

            She seemed about to reply when an excited shout broke the fog.

            "Hero!" called a familiar voice.

            "HERO! HERO!" repeated the same voice, popping and cracking.

            "Argie?!" shouted Hero, straightening up to look for his companions in the haze. "Dial!?"

            She rushed out of the fog at him, colliding with his lower body and wrapping invisible arms around his middle, squeezing the air from his lungs. Dial hopped up and down atop her telly-head, repeating "FOUND FOUND FOUND!" in Argie's voice.

            "You're alive!" cried Argie. "I was really hoping you'd still be alive!"

            "Ah, thanks?" said Hero, trying to find a way to pry her arms off of him. "The sentiment goes both ways, I assure you."

            "Is this your guide?" asked L-ah, bringing Argie's attention to her.

            "Yep!" answered the telly. "I'm Argie, what's your name?"

            "This is Ella," provided Hero.

            "L-ah," corrected L-ah.

            "Ah," said Argie. "So not Lah?"

            The doll seemed to bristle. "Definitely not Lah."

            "Thanks for finding my Hero, L-ah," said Argie gratefully. "I was scared I'd never get him found."

            "It's easier when more people look, isn't it?" said L-ah.

            "It really is," agreed Argie. Her head tilted to the side, a bit of magenta dripping down her screen. "D'you need to be found? We can stick around with you for a little while."

            "No," said L-ah. "I'm just looking. Thanks though."

            Argie nodded like this was a proper answer. L-ah looked up at Hero, and he wished he could read her stony face for an expression. He'd read somewhere that children's toys, dolls and stuffed things, mostly, were made with neutral expressions so that the child who owned them could project onto them. All he got from L-ah's face was cold porcelain and bright eyes.

            "I'm glad you got found," she said sincerely. "Try and find me if you ever get lost again."

            "I will," he said, hoping against hope he would never again in his life find himself lost in this awful fog. "I hope you find whatever it is you're looking for."

            "Thanks," she said, and he liked to think that she might have smiled if her lips would allow.

            "C'mon," said Argie, tugging at his shirt. "I've got something to show you!"

            He followed after Argie obediently, waving goodbye to L-ah as they left her standing in the fog of Lost. As they walked, the mist seemed to dissipate around them, clearing with each step until the world had returned in full color. Argie bounced ahead of him, nearly skipping with more delight than a child who had just assumably fallen from the height of the sun to avoid being burned to death had any right to have.

            "Where is it you're taking me?" he asked, looking ahead. The change of finally being able to see where he was going was almost jarring, and he spotted something ahead - a mass of colors. Tents and wagons and flags, all garishly bright in stripes and polka-dots, decorated the horizon, and their path was headed straight for the heart of it all.

            Argie looked back and up at him, a wide technicolor grin on her screen. "I found a circus."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to Kykyl25 for letting me use darling L-ah for this chapter! I hope I did her justice, friend =)


	11. The Circus

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A lot of hustle and bustle and geebs is still bad at the whole 'feelings' thing.

            Indeed, it was a circus if Hero had ever seen one, and it was bustling. Monsters of all shapes, sizes and kinds rushed about, most with their arms full of this or that, one running by with multiple advertizing signs while another balanced far too many stuffed bears. They were packing up as far as Hero could tell, with much focus on loading the colorful wooden wagons and pulling stakes from the ground to loose the great striped tarp of the main tent.

            Argie walked amongst the place, ducking and weaving much more effortlessly than Hero was. She was looking up at everything in childlike wonder and not seeming at all out of place, despite everyone else's busyness. Some of the monsters gave her a nod as they went, or flashed a smile or a wave if they had a free arm. Hero stuck close, wary of getting trodden on by some monsters that were over twice his height and five times his width.

            "Argie," he said worriedly. "I don't think they're putting on a show. Rather, I think they're taking one down. I have a feeling they're planning to leave by tonight."

            "LEAVE TONIGHT," agreed Dial from Argie's head, sheltering himself between her speaker-ears.

            "I know," said Argie brightly. "We're going with them."

            "We are?" asked Hero.

            "Well," explained the girl. "We need to get to the library, and they're all heading that way anyway, so I asked if when I found you we could all go together and they said yes!"

            "Why are we going to a library?" asked Hero, watching a werewolf in a waistcoat attempt to pry a stake out of the ground with his bare hands, fail, and have a girl with what appeared to be octopus tentacles growing from her head come by and remove it for him.

            "I need to see if there's books about something," she said vaguely, rushing ahead to knock excitedly on the door of a purple wagon. "Hello!" she shouted at the door. "I'm back!"

            Hero approached warily, waiting to see what exactly would answer. Hero seemed to be buzzing with excitement though, so much that Dial was beginning to pick up on her extra static and give off small noises of feedback. She looked back at her Hero with a wide smile.

            "This is where Tobin lives," she explained. "He's a bug." Her voice dropped to a whisper, as if disclosing a secret. "I love bugs."

            With that, the door opened, and there was a fly the size of a large man.

            Tobin turned out to be quite amiable, and offered the two a place to sleep in his wagon. He had a couch and an armchair in the back, in a small room where various combinations of musical instruments hung on the walls. Hero examined one, some sort of triple-trumpet with one mouthpiece and three horns, while Argie and Tobin discussed someone called Melody at the front of the wagon and how apparently she'd given Tobin many tricks for the combination of sounds the last time they'd run into her, and how he missed the times when she'd used to travel with the circus.

            Eventually the wagon lurched and started up, and Tobin disappeared to go steer while Argie came back to join her Hero, who had settled himself on the couch.

            "They have a show tomorrow," she said, "So the wagons go through the night."

            "I thought you were the one who always stressed the importance of sleeping once the night came," said Hero, settling himself in the couch cushions. The couch was large, to fit its owner, but the size just added comfort, and it worked well as a bed for the short man.

            "Well, all the monsters will sleep," explained the girl, crawling up into the armchair that was much too big for her and placing Dial on the cushion beside her. "The wagons know where to go, so by the time we all wake up we'll be where we need to."

            "And the wagons run on their own, do they?"

            "They go where they're needed," she explained. "Usually towards crowds or places that need something lively."

            Hero furrowed his brow, trying to pay attention but getting distracted by the two empty shirtsleeves of the girl's shirt. "Any chance you'll come across something long-sleeved anytime soon?"

            Argie tilted her head at him. "Why?"

            "You haven't got any arms," he said, waving vaguely. "It's freaking me out."

            "Oh," said Argie, looking down at her own lack of visible appendages. "That's cuz my amour got eaten by those Doubts."

            "Your armor?" asked Hero. "You mean your coat?"

            "Yeah."

            "And you can't borrow another one?"

            She shrugged. "From who?"

            He scowled at this. Finally, he peeled off his gloves, dirt-covered and frayed as they were, and tossed them over towards the girl.

            "Put these on," he said. "Then at least I can see your hands."

            She held the gloves, looking down at them for a moment as a single drip of green hung from the bottom of her screen. The girl pulled them on, flexing her fingers into them and smiling. "They'll do," she said at last. "They are mine, they are me."

            Hero's brow furrowed again. "'They are yours, they are you'? What's that mean?"

            Her smile brightened. "Wow, you didn't even need me to tell you to say it."

            "Say what?" Hero said, noticing that it was quite obvious that his gloves had somehow become much smaller to fit his guide, the fingers shortening and rounding out. He groaned before she could answer, waving away his own question. "Nevermind. It's been a very long day and it's far too late to think about ridiculous monster-isms."

            He rolled over on the sofa, facing away from her. She was silent for a few moments, and then her small voice carried over to him.

            "Thank you."

            "They're just gloves," he replied.

            "Yeah, but," she hesitated. "Also for looking for me. You didn't have to, but I'm glad you did."

            Something welled up inside him. Something worrying and unfamiliar and he shoved it back down as best he could.

            "Yes, well," he said. "I can't very well find my way home on my own. And I do still expect you to take me home as soon as we're done with this library business."

            Argie was silent, and when Hero turned over to look at her he noted that she'd buried her face in the crook of the chair, probably trying to find a comfortable place to sleep.

            "Of course," he muttered. "She must've nodded off already." He turned back towards the back of the sofa and scrunched in on himself. "Bad habit, if you ask me. She's always out cold for the important bits. I'll just remind her in the morning."

            Dial saw the drips of blue and yellow soaking into the fabric of the armchair, but decided that there were moments that deserved quiet.

 

*

 

            The circus had obviously been up before dawn setting itself back up, because when Argie and her Hero emerged from the wagon it was already at its full glory. Colored flags were strung up between wagons and tents, loosely marking twisting pathways that led past all the most enticing attractions before all roads ended at the entrance to the main tent.

            Argie was handling the fully fledged circus like any child would; that is to say, with lots of squealing and sleeve-tugging and pointing and running off to see what this or that was. Dial had figured out quickly that Argie's head was not such a safe spot when she was running hither and tither, so the microphone had resigned himself to laying across Hero's shoulders as the man followed behind the girl at a more reasonable place.

            She was very much enamored with the carnival games, and spent several minutes trying desperately to pop balloons with a number of dull darts to win herself a stuffed frog. Eventually the creature running the attraction grew tired of her cuteness and shooed her away, since if she couldn't pay he couldn't very well let her continue taking free shots forever. Argie pouted by her Hero's side as they continued through the rows of rigged games, and though he tried not to feel bad for her he found himself failing miserably at the color-bar frown and drips of  blue that ran down her casing.

            His eyes fell on a game featuring cork rifles, and he steered them towards it.

            "Excuse me," he said to the thing behind the counter, a young lion with a snake attached as a tail. Both of its heads turned to look at him, and he grinned feebly. "I'm not the most familiar with how currency works here, but I was wondering what it might take to play a round?"

            "You're the Hero, arent'cha?" asked the lion head.

            "Free sssshot for the Hero," said the snake.

            "You're too kind," he said, picking up one of the rifles that was tied to the counter by a rope leash and pushing a pitted cork into the muzzle with his thumb. He fitted the gun to his shoulder with a dull sense of familiarity, aimed carefully, breathed out, and shot.

            A small tin target fell from the shelf at the back of the tent. He tried not to flinch at the sound of it hitting the floor.

            Argie cheered, excitedly patting her hands on the countertop as she bounced with glee. The snake hissed out what may have been an impressed whistle while the lion's head grinned.

            "Good sssshot! You get a prizzze for that."

            Hero stepped back, motioning Argie forward. "Take your pick."

            She pointed to a stuffed green snake. The snake head of the chimera nodded in approval as the lion batted it down from the shelf and into Argie's arms. She hugged it close, making a high-pitched 'eeeee!' of excitement as Hero allowed himself a smile on her behalf.

            "You like it?" he asked, re-entering the flow of people with her and leaving the games behind them.

            "I love it!" she cried happily. "How'd you learn to shoot like that?"

            Hero looked off on the horizon, raising a hand above his eyes to see better. "I say, Argie, is that a carousel?"

            She gasped loudly and ran off towards it. Hero kept up his grin until she'd run far enough away.

            "GOOD SHOT," said Dial.

            "Quiet, you," scowled Hero, watching Argie talk excitedly with the carousel operator.

            "WHO YOU SHOOT?" asked the mic.

            "Not a person, if that's what you're asking," said Hero beneath his breath. "I'd rather not talk about it."

            Argie was motioned past the gate and climbed onto the carousel. She picked a seat on a ladybug whose legs pivoted with each movement. The girl made sure to wave excitedly every time she came around to where she could see Hero. Each time, he would lift an arm and wiggle his fingers in a return wave, and her smile would brighten and she'd kick her booted feet and Hero would once again see her not as a monster, but as a young girl at a circus enjoying her childhood.

            Their next stop was a long building with the word 'freakshow' above the door. It did not seem well populated, despite the bustling crowds, but Hero and Argie ventured in anyway.

            The reason why it was unpopular became clear to Hero about halfway through. While the monsters on display were foreign and fascinating to him, as a human, he realized that they were, essentially, quite similar in form to many other monsters he'd found to populate the world in which he was visiting. Well, perhaps not similar individually, but in a world inhabited by monsters, what then became a freak?

            He supposed himself, namely. When one inhabited the land of creatures so very unlike humans, it was the lone human who became the outlier.

            Argie was waving excitedly at the next performer. Hero joined her at the glass to see what he initially took for a human woman (giving himself quite a shock) but upon closer examination seemed instead to be a number of body parts all sewn together into an approximation of one. The woman waved with her left hand - which had been replaced by a red lobster claw - smiling brightly at Argie.

            "Hi Suzy!" yelled Argie.

            "Hello!" she called through the glass. "I see you've found your Hero!"

            "I did!" Argie shouted back. Hero gave the woman a wave and she smiled back at him. He noted that she had bandages criss-crossed across where her nose might be, if she'd had one.

            She gave him an approving nod, then looked back to Argie. "You'll join us backstage for the show, won't you?"

            "Of course!" Argie exclaimed.

            "Well you'd better hurry," said the patchwork woman. "The show'll be starting soon."

            Argie nodded, tugging Hero by the sleeve towards the exit. He gently pulled his arm away, following her at an acceptable pace so that she didn't feel the need to pull him along, and wondering just what awaited them at a circus made of monsters.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Special thanks to tie-dye-flag, whose OC's Reggie, Josephine, Tobin, and Suzy appear here and will continue to appear next chapter. Thank you for showing me your Freakshow Circus and I hope I do your babies justice.


	12. Make 'em Laugh

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Y'all thought this was gonna end happy, didn't you.

            They avoided the main entrance of the tent, instead entering through the back to where monsters were dressing up and down and preparing their acts for the show. A pair of tapshoes with no wearer were practicing a routine in an isolated corner, while a centaur in a corset was attempting to tame the wild hair of a werewolf into neat coils.

            "Be careful!" he cried in a haughty voice, tugging at the bottom of his waistcoat and fidgeting in his chair, watching her work in the lighted mirror in front of him. "You're going to brush me bald!"

            "And then what would you do for an act?" asked the centaur teasingly. "Stay still, I've still got to go do Josephine when I'm done with you, and I haven't even begun to get myself ready."

            Argie snapped Hero out of his eavesdropping by calling him from the flap of a canvas divider that separated the main ring from the backstage portion. "You can see everything from here," she said, and Hero took his place beside her, wary of those who passed in and out around them.

            The opening act was mostly everybody out at once, and some sort of catchy song whose lyrics left Hero's mind as soon as it had finished, though the tune stuck annoyingly in his head as the scene changed. There were several clowns of various sizes and shapes that ran around throwing pies and honking horns and piling into cars that were far too small. Then the tap-shoes he'd seen earlier, evidently called Richie and Louie, emerged to do an energetic number on a raised wooden stage.

            Once they'd tapped themselves silly and returned to the back of the tent, the werewolf emerged, fluffed within an inch of his life and dressed to the nines. He made a show of very haughty roars and pretentious attempts at being ferocious as a large fish tank was rolled up beside him. The octopus-headded woman within batted her lashes at him as he preened himself in his own reflection on the side of her tank, ignoring her completely and making her pout. She responded by rocking her own tank back and fourth a few times until a sizable wave broke over the ledge and soaked the wolf. Hero initially thought the wolf-man had vanished entirely into a puddle of hair, but no, within the soaked mess was a twig of a man, about 10% of his previous apparent mass. The crowd roared and both he and the octopus woman bowed and made their exit.

            "I do say, you didn't have to splash me quite so much," complained the werewolf as he stalked, dripping, into the back room. The tank was wheeled in and the octopus woman made to climbing out of it, sitting on the ledge and wringing out her dress.

            "Sorry, Reggie," apologized the woman. "The audience did love it though."

            Reggie had no direct response to this, so he just mumbled something about "I'll be in my trailer" and sopped off, leaving a wet trail in his wake.

            "Don't mind him," said the woman to Argie and Hero. "He's always grumpy when wet. Well, he's grumpy most of the time, but especially when wet."

            "I can relate," said Hero, offering her a hand to climb down to the ground from her perch on the tank ledge.

            "I'm Josephine," she said, finding her footing on solid ground.

            "This is Argie," Hero introduced. "And I'm the Hero." He motioned to where Reggie had disappeared to. "Are you two-?"

            "What, me and Reggie? Heavens no!" she barked a laugh. "Mine's out there playing the music." She raised an arm, pointing out the canvas flap.

            Hero followed her motion to see Tobin, the fly whose wagon they'd shared, playing one of his many-horned instruments. His multiple legs made quick work of tuning and pressing and playing, and his proboscis buzzed against the mouthpiece, making them all sing.

            Well, sing may not have been the correct word, especially considering the instrument of the girl beside him (the same one from the Freakshow tent, he noticed). A dozen mouths, at least, were all connected to one mouth-piece, and sung in harmony as the girl played the unorthodox instrument (still with one crab-claw hand, though she'd seemed to have sewn on many other arms to be able to handle the instrument as well as her counterpart).

            "Those are quite the instruments," Hero admired.

            "Quite the musicians," said Josephine fondly.

            Argie shushed them as she turned to watch the next act. Hero turned away from the door, facing the woman opposite him. "So how long have you been working here?"  

            "Long enough," she answered. "I stay around because I'm useful. Nobody else knows how to fix the lights when they go on the fritz. Plus, I've got Tobin now. The Circus is a good place for us. Though..." she trailed off, pensive.

            "Though?" asked Hero.

            "It's different now," she said, looking out at the crowd. "The crowds aren't the same as they used to be. A lot of people have no time for a circus. A lot of others come because they need to laugh, or escape, or think about anything but... well, the end."

            "Ah," Hero said. "Because the world is-?"

            "Ending," she supplied. "Yes."

            "That's one thing I don't understand," said Hero. "How can you tell?"

            "Sometimes you just know," said Josephine. "When a thing is dying. A romance. A person. Even a world." She looked up at the Hero with a dry smile. "You can feel it."

            He opened his mouth to respond, but was interrupted by several monsters running through the flap with what looked like severed body parts piled in their arms. There was suddenly a great commotion as the green parts were dumped all on a table, and the head of the girl who had been playing the instrument made of mouths was placed atop the pile.

            "Suzy!" called Josephine, rushing off to the limb-pile's side.

            "I'm fine, really!" said the head, trying to smile it off. "I just got a bit excited, stitches got loose-"

            Reggie the werewolf was back, only half-blowdried so that one side of him was back to full fluff while the other still hung wet and limp. He rushed to the disassembled girl's side and immediately began to fuss.

            "Oh, Suzy, I told you adding extra arms would be bad for your stitching! Are you alright? Did you lose anything?"

            "Just my dignity," she answered with a grin. "Someone go get the seamstress. I can help with the stitching once I've got a set of arms reattached."

            "Your act is in five minutes, what are we supposed to-"

            "I'll be back together in a jiffy. Just have someone else go first!"

            "We can't, they all need the time to prepare!"

            The performers dove into a flurry of suggestions and arguments, trying to find an act that could move up the schedule and failing.

            The Hero watched them, something tickling in the back of his head. The memory of the Mirth and the tree, a catchy tune stuck in the back of his head, Josephine's earlier words, _they come because they need to laugh..._

            Hero felt a swell of something in his chest and he stepped forward, breaking the argument with a "Pardon me!"

            A myriad of faces turned to stare at the human in their midst. Hero cleared his throat.

            "Hello! I know most of you are not acquainted with me, but I thought I might introduce myself. I just so happen to be an Actor by profession, when I'm not running about on Hero business. Does anyone here know the first thing an Actor learns?" He grinned brightly, snapping his fingers. "The show must go on! Come rain, come shine, come snow, come sleet - the show must go on!"

            The group stared at him, then gave several glances to the monsters to their left and right, and then back at him.

            The man cleared his throat, rocking to his heels. "What I'm saying is, I have an act," Hero clarified, thumbing his cane. "If you should need one."

            "I don't see why not," said Suzy's head from the table.

            This opened the rest of the group up to nod and make general noises of agreement.

            "Wonderful!" Hero brightened. "Now, I'll just need a piano, a couch, a mannequin, two steep ramps and a breakaway wall."

 

*

 

            They were able to pull together his needs just in time, rushing to set them out as he'd specified just as the previous act was finishing. Argie had run to Tobin to tell him of the change and give him the musical score. Finally, there was a thumbs up from Josephine and Hero took the stage.

            The silence when he stepped out was immediate. The monsters who had previously been so rowdy looked down upon the center ring, saw a human, and seemed to all simultaneously wonder why on earth he was out there. Hundreds of eyes and not-eyes and things without eyes watched him intently as he straightened his straw hat upon his curls and walked as confidently as he could to the piano that was waiting for him.

            He moved to brush his coattails out of the way before sitting, remembered that he'd lost his coat, and just sat. He flexed his fingers and put them to the ivory keys, the bone cold against his bare fingertips. His head turned, addressing the audience with his most beautiful smile.

            "The world is so full of a number of things," he spoke, projecting his voice as his fingers played a few harmonious notes. "I'm sure we should all be as happy as." His smile faltered and his hands curled up, away from the keys.

            "But are we? No!" He cried dramatically as he slammed a few discordant notes.

            "Definitely no!" Another keysmash.

            "Positively no!" He bashed an entire forearm on the piano.

            "Decidedly no!" The heel of one fake spat plunked on the end of the keyboard.

            "Nuh-uh." He shook his head, pouting out his bottom lip.

            There were scattered chuckles from the audience. Good. He was warming them up. He slammed his hat atop the piano dramatically, his fingers returning to the keys to move their way up the scales.

            "Short people," he said. "Have long faces. And long people have short faces." His fingers plucked out notes as he went, making faces to match his words. "Tall people have little humor, and little people have no humor at all!"

            He hopped atop the piano, crossing one leg over the other and grinning up at the audience. The laughs were a bit freer now. He replaced his hat and stood upon the keys, making discordant music as he dramatically walked forward with his words.

            "And in the words of that immortal bard, Samuel J. Snodgrass, as he was about to be led to the guillotine!" He hopped off of the piano, taking a deep breath as he began to sing.

            " _Make em laugh! Make em laugh! Don't you know everyone wants to laugh_?" He knelt, raising an arm dramatically. " _My dad said 'be an actor, my son. But be a comical one!_ '"

            He had them hooked. They adored his bits on his knees, dancing at half his normal height. They squealed as he knocked himself silly on boards that were being carried past. His bit with running into a solid wall and consequently screwing up and attempting to un-skew his face caused hoots. The entire mannequin section, with the flirting and fighting and tossing around of himself and it, elicited howls. The time he spend just repeatedly falling over had the audience in tears.

            He stood, arms out and wide, facing the wrong way. He quickly corrected himself, pretending to not even notice the pre-planned mistake. He was panting, sore from the repeated use of physical humor, but his finale was at hand.

            "Make 'em laugh!" he called, turning on his heel to sprint at one of the ramps he'd requested. He ran up, making it vertical and pulling off the backflip better than he ever had when he'd done this in Uni. The crowd went wild.

            "Make 'em laugh!" he repeated, running for the back wall. This one was steeper, nearly a 90 degree angle, but still he managed to get up and flip, eliciting gasps and 'ooh's from the gathered monsters.

            "Make. 'Em. Laugh!"

            He made his full sprint towards the final, breakaway wall. He'd done this before, a handful of times at least, so he knew what to expect. When he sprung, he aimed his heels at the wall and prepared to break through.

            It gave far too easily.

            He soared through, his velocity unhindered by the weak barrier, and his heels skidded and his arms flung out and his head hit the ground with a resounding _CRACK_.

            The world spun about him, the high lights of the circus tent making pinwheels above his head. There was something, something important; his act. His act! The show must go on, he thought, pushing himself off the floor and trying to crawl back through the hole he'd left in the faux wall.

            He shouted something, which he was mostly sure was the last line of the song, and he figured they were applauding but he was also on the floor again and the lights were making him terribly dizzy with the way they wouldn't stay still. Someone grabbed his arms and another person (he assumed) grabbed his legs, and then he was backstage and there was a technicolor grin above him dripping green on his face.

            "You did great!" she cheered from far away, and her voice was echoed in the tinny recording below chanting "DID GREAT DID GREAT!"

            He held one arm up and stuck out his thumb in a thumbs-up, a weak smile on his lips.

            Another face appeared in his vision, all bushy hair and green skin and a white X where a nose should be.

            "He doesn't look so good. How hard did he land?" asked Suzy.

            "Very. I think I heard his brain rattle," said someone outside of his view.

            She held up a hand. "How many fingers, actor boy?"

            "That depends," he answered. "Which hand should I count?"

            "Yeah, he's out of it. Someone take him to my wagon, I'll take care of him after my act. Try'n keep him awake till I get there." She leaned over, whispering something to Argie. Though the patchwork woman was smiling slyly, Argie's expression faltered, drips of blue and yellow falling.

            Someone picked him up. Dial was on his chest, repeating "KEEP AWAKE KEEP AWAKE" as they went. The air was cold as they exited the tent, then warm as they were inside again. Someone was talking and his eyelids were heavy and he wanted very badly to rest his eyes. He wasn't as young as he had been in Uni, and the routine had taken a lot out of him.

            "KEEP AWAKE, KEEP AWAKE," said Dial from his chest.

            "Shhh," said the Hero, letting his eyelids droop. "'s just a nap."

            Dial prodded Hero's face with the edge of his ON AIR sign, but the man just groaned in annoyance, refusing to open his eyes. The microphone moved back a bit, pondering, then repeated the words it had managed to catch earlier.

            "IF HE DIES, I GET HIS CHEEKBONES," said Dial in Suzy's voice.

            "That's nice," said Hero before he drifted and lost his hold on consciousness.  

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks again to tie-dye-flag for letting me use your circus babies. I do hope I continued to do them justice.


	13. Miss Cell Any's

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> We interrupt your potential angst to bring you a much needed shopping spree.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Lmao it has been literally forever but I said I'd update when they left Cell's and guess what happened it's a Christmas miracle.
> 
> Anyway enjoy this brief overlap with canon before I take the plot and go sideways once again.

            There was nobody there in the wagon with him when he woke. A gauze bandage was wrapped around his head, keeping his unruly curls up and away from his face. He felt at it with his fingertips, tracing the edges to map their overlap in his mind's eye. They felt clean, which was good, as it meant he wasn't bleeding out. As far as good signs went, not dying was among his favorite.

            His eyes went to his surroundings as he noted that the wagon was very different than the one he and Argie had spent the previous night in. This wagon was obviously used regularly as a clinic. Jars of medical implements and dried plants lined the walls, and he himself was laying on a stretcher, which became less frightening when he realized it was most likely used as a makeshift examination table and a patchwork quilt had been laid on top of him in his sleep.

            He lowered his hand from his head, but not before his eye caught something brightly colored on the back of his hand. A quick examination revealed a colorful bandage, the sort of which children put on bruises and scrapes, adorned with a repeating tiled pattern of colorful hearts. His imagination filled in the blanks, seeing Argie carefully applying the band-aid and patting his hand, nodding with satisfaction at 'helping'.

            His ears perked at the sound of voices from outside the wagon. The thin walls in the small space didn't make the feat of overhearing very difficult, and whoever was outside was certainly making no attempt to be quiet. He crept to the door regardless, pressing an ear to the wood. There was a voice he didn't recognize; prickly in a grandmotherly type of way, scolding, but with warmth beneath.

            "-n't possibly keep going as-is. You'll be eaten alive before you take five steps, and that's IF the griefs don't get you. And what happened to your coat? That was good amour, you know, nearly as good as those boots of yours-"

            Argie's familiar voice interjected. "Sorry Miss Cell. 'S why I came."

            "Well you should have come sooner. I do worry about you running about out there, and with humans! If there wasn't a faster way to get yourself in a whole muck of trouble. I'm assuming your Hero's in there?"

            Hero froze at hearing himself referenced. His panic was quelled by the voice of Suzy, the carnie girl.

            "He got himself knocked out, so we decided it was faster to just bring the whole wagon rather than to wait for him to wake up."

            "Less likely to get caught, too. You know Her guards frequent here, and you're not exactly inconspicuous, you know-"

            "He needs amour really bad," interrupted Argie. "We couldn't wait."

            "COULDN'T WAIT," parroted Dial.

            "Well if he makes a habit of getting knocked out I'm sure he will. Besides, I can smell disdain from here. I doubt any piece of his clothing has enough love to deter even the weakest doubt. Whoever you picked out this time, he's a real character. Why don't you come out, Dearie, so I can take a look at you?"

            The last part was said with a raised voice, and Hero stumbled back, his face flushing at being caught. Not having much of a choice, he cracked the door open to take a peek.

            There before him was Argie, Suzy, and an enormous hedgehog. The hedgehog had a pair of wire glasses perched on her pointed nose, and great swathes and rags of brightly colored cloths hanging from her pins, to the point where they'd matted themselves into a sort of patchwork shawl. She squinted at him, her nose twitching.

            "Well," she said, sounding somehow impressed. "Look at you."

            "You're awake!" Argie squealed, bounding up the couple of steps to collide fully with his legs, wrapping her small arms solidly around his middle. Dial, seemingly holding on for dear life, was also chiming "AWAKE AWAKE."

            The Hero patted the top of her plastic head awkwardly, still too disoriented to fully peel her off. He looked up at the stranger again.

            "Hello," he said with a sheepish smile, hesitating in the doorway. "I don't believe we've been introduced." His eyes were drawn beyond her to the garishly colorful area in which he'd found himself. "I also must admit I'm a bit fuzzy as to where we are."

            "Well I already know you're little Argie's Hero, but you may call me Cell." She raised a short arm, her great open sleeve of scraps dragging across the floor with her gesture. "And this is Miss Cell-Any's Emporium."

            And an emporium it was.

            Actually, it was an emporium set up inside what appeared to be an enormous carousel, complete with all manners of colorful beasts on poles that sat still around them. He imagined the ride in motion would have been a sight to behold, though the stationary version was still almost too much to take in. Above them, many parasols and great ropes of fabric hung from the mechanical supports, coating the ceiling in circles and curves of pastels. A number of monsters wandered throughout the emporium, picking up items, turning them over, carrying one with them as they continued to browse. He wondered if it mightn't be impossible for one to find just about anything in the bustling place.

            "Goodness," he said, running a hand through his hair. "This is quite a business you have here."

            "We are the best there is," said Cell proudly.

            "Glad to see you up and about," said Suzy. "We were just about to make you a bed here. Can't rightly wait forever for you to wake up."

            "How long was I out?" asked the Hero.

            "Nearly two days!" Argie supplied, finally peeling herself off of the man.

            "As much as I love having company, we do have shows to run," Suzy said, green-skinned arms crossed. "I'm afraid this is as far as I can take you, I've got to get back to the caravan before they get too far."

            "Thank you for everything," Argie said, leaving Hero to go and hug Suzy. The homunculus woman returned the hug enthusiastically.

            "For you, Argie, anytime. Just not right this moment because I gotta go." She set the telly child down and gave her a pat on the head. She looked up to Hero with a bit of a serious glint in her usually mischievous eyes. "You be good to her, alright?"

            The Hero didn't answer, but merely stepped out of her way as Suzy climbed up into her wagon. The door closed behind her and the wagon shuddered for a moment. Then, like a great beast, it gathered itself up on its wheels and began to move, rolling itself straight out of the emporium, taking care to avoid the shoppers who turned to watch it leave.

            Hero took a moment to watch it as well, and was only distracted by Cell, who had started poking and prodding him and taking measurements.

            "Amour for both of you, you said?" Cell asked, pulling up one of the Hero's arms and running a measuring tape down it. "I assume you brought payment?"

            "'Course!" Argie said, setting Dial down on the floor and patting herself down for a moment. Hero watched as she reached a gloved hand down the neck of her shirt and emerged with a glass jar filled with what appeared to be very angry Easter grass.

            Cell gasped, letting the measuring tape go slack for a moment. "Argie," she almost scolded. "How on earth did you get that?"

            "I caught it myself," she said proudly.

            "You've been _keeping_ one of them?" Hero asked incredulously. "Those nearly killed us!"

            "That's what makes it worth so much," said Argie as if it were the simplest thing in the world. "Will this Mirth cover it all?"

            "I suppose that will do it. Amour for two, then. I'll let you go with Tinker since you already know the drill."

            "Tinker's here?" asked Argie, perking up excitedly. Green had begun to stream freely from her grin.

            "Of course he is, child, he's one of my finest. He's over by that rabbit, you see him, don't you? Come and find me with your final decisions, and don't dilly-dally too long!" Cell turned to Hero as Argie scampered off. "As for you, come with me."

            Hero looked nervously at the retreating Argie.

            "I don't bite," laughed Cell. "Come on. Let us find you something. TAILOR!?"

            Hero jumped straight up at the last bit, which was more of a piercing holler across the space. Funnily enough most of the customers didn't even bother to look up at the shout, leading the Hero to believe that this was a common occurrence.

            There was a reply back through the rows- "What is it this time?"

            With a flurry of cloth strips and a flash of purple there was suddenly a figure in front of them. Two limbs of the coiled cloth rested on the hips of a mannequin, while two more limbs held the figure up from the rafters. The cloth collected at the shoulders and formed into a head, where a gap created a scowling mouth. A number of short cloth curls poked out from beneath what appeared to be a police cap atop their head.

            "What do we have here?" asked the figure.

            "Tailor, where did we put those suits?"

            "Which ones?" asked Tailor.

            "The colorful ones, fresh in. We should have something that halfway fits. I've never seen a figure so short yet broad shouldered." Cell pinched at Hero's hips. "Yet such a slim waist, don't you eat?"

            "Hey now," Hero said, bristling.

            "It's alright, there are many others who that figure would look much worse on," said Tailor, elbowing him playfully.

            "Flirt on your own time, young man!" scolded Cell.

            Tailor pulled away with a frown, and though they had no eyes Hero could feel that they'd be rolling. "It's not my fault if our customer decides to flatter himself. The suits, you said?"

            "Chop chop! We haven't got all day!" Cell clapped her hands as Tailor swung off, navigating around pillars and poles.

            The Hero straightened his bowtie, clearing his throat. "So, Tailor?" He pointed at the direction the figure had vanished. "...He?"

            "For today. It's always good to ask for yourself, you know." Cell shot the man a look.

            Hero flushed again. "Right. Of course."

            By this time Tailor was swinging back with a pile of suit pieces in his cloth arms. "Will this do?"

            "Quite nicely, I think" said Cell approvingly. She took a jacket, shirt and pair of slacks from the pile and turned to Hero. "Alright, try these on."

            His flushed face suddenly paled. "Right here?"

            "I don't see why not?"

            He stammered a moment, tugging at the bottom of his shirt. "Is there nowhere more private?"

            Tailor made a move forward. "I can set up a changing room if you need one."

            Hero looked at the mannequin as if they were made of gold. "I'd be much obliged."

            It took a couple of moments to string up a few reams of fabric into a small square changing room. The Hero nearly immediately found himself engaged in an exciting game of dress-up. There were all manner of suits in all manner of colors, and he found himself very engaged in showing his combinations to the very receptive Cell and Tailor, who upon Cell's instruction kept bringing more and more clothes for him to try on.

            He tried on a golden number with striped slacks, and a white suit with red trim which he felt would be more complete with a stalk of celery on the lapel. A brownish maroon number reminded him greatly of something he'd seen in an old animated film. He was very nearly sold on a black and teal ordeal, but finally settled on a suit of a more pastel blue.

            "A charming color on you, Dearie," Cell doted. "Why don't you go and show Argie?"

            "Well, if you insist," he said, looking about for the girl. He caught a flash of red near the edge of the carousel and began to head over towards her.

            Since he'd seen her last she'd changed into a red sweater that looked altogether too big for her. The girl was speaking with what appeared to be a blue and red owl who'd perched upon her outstretched arm. As he approached, he watched her motion enthusiastically with her free hand, then, apparently without hesitation, she pulled off one gloved hand and handed it to the waiting bird, who flew off with it.

            "What was that?" Hero asked, finally close enough for conversation.

            "Oh!" Argie turned, offering a colorful grin as she looked him up and down. "I like your suit!"

            "Did you just give that bird one of my gloves?" Hero asked, putting a hand up over his eye to try to spot where the owl had flown off to.

            "I'll get you some new ones if you want them."

            "They were _my_ gloves!" he said indignantly.

            "But you gave them to me," she defended.

            "Not so you could give them away!" he huffed. "Why did you give it to them anyway?"

            "I needed help finding someone. C'mon, let's find you some new ones-" She skipped off towards the center of the emporium, leaving Hero to run off after her.

            When he caught up Argie was having what appeared to be a one-sided conversation with an enormous praying mantis who was nearly entirely made of metal tools. To everything Argie said, the mantis would respond with a series of clicks and clacks.

            Argie turned to Hero again. "Tinker said he can find you something. Don't worry!"

            "Something?" Hero gave a sidelong glance at the enormous insect. As he watched, Tinker used a forearm (made of a handsaw, giving Hero quite a fright) to saw off two front paws on the rabbit he stood next to. He offered them to the Hero with a polite series of clicks.

            Hero looked hopelessly to Argie, who with her one remaining hand pantomimed putting on a pair of gloves.

            He shrugged, pulling off his outer jacket and slinging it over an arm. He made a hesitant attempt to pull one of the seemingly solid rabbit's feet over his bare hands. To his surprise and amazement they formed into perfectly fitted gloves, black backs with pale blue palms to match his suit.

            He barely had time to marvel the ridiculous nature of it all before there was a sharp cry from nearby.

            "WHAT ON EARTH HAVE YOU DONE TO YOUR SLEEVES?!"

            Hero whirled to come nose-to-nose with a very upset Cell. He looked down at his offending sleeves, which he had previously rolled up beneath his suit jacket.

            "I... rolled them?"

            "And what do you expect the state of them will be when they are unrolled?" She scowled. "Honestly, it's no wonder your previous things reek of disdain if you treat them like that! I simply will not permit you to wear my wares if this is how you will be using them."

            He barely had time to open his mouth in his own defense before two strips of cloth had cornered him on either side. In a moment they had unrolled his sleeves and pulled them down, the full length of them covering even his new gloves.

            He made a quick attempt to pull them back up. "Well you see? They're too long for me!"

            "I told you to begin with that it would be difficult-"

            "Well then, why do you care what I do to ensure they fit?"

            "I will not have you mishandling merchandise!"

            "But I-"

            There was a tug at one of his sleeves.

            He looked down to see Argie, standing at his side with a couple of ribbons in her glove.

            "Kneel down, please," she instructed.

            Too flustered to argue, he did as he was told.

            Argie made quick work of her task, pulling the sleeves up about his forearms and securing them with the ribbons. Working like garters, they managed to keep his shirtsleeves up to a length where they buttoned nicely at his wrists.

            "There you go!" she said, taking a step back and looking at her handiwork.

            The man stood, looking down at his sleeves, turning them this way and that. Something in his throat stuck a little as he looked at them. Not once in his career had he ever found a shirt that fit him properly. There was a reason rolling his own sleeves was such second nature.

            Somehow he managed to not catch his voice when he said "Thank you."

            The sight of Tailor and Cell wiping tears from their eyes got him to snap back to his senses. "Right-o. Are we done here?"

            "Oh, almost!" The girl looked up to Cell. "There's one more thing, can I ask you and Tinker?"

            "Of course Dearie- Oh, tell me you didn't sell a hand again, you always seem to be losing them. You never trade them for what they're worth-" She took Argie by the remaining hand and led her and Tinker off.

            "So you're the Hero?"

            The Hero turned to see Tailor, standing there with cloth arms crossed, and looking at him with a bemused smile.

            "Apparently," he answered.

            "I will admit, she's done worse."

            "You're oh too kind," he deadpanned. "If you're going to tell me to look after her, I'm afraid you're a bit late- a significant number have already told me the same."

            "I was going to tell you to look after yourself. I feel that's the more useful advice."

            He blinked at the mannequin. "Really now?"

            "Don't get me wrong, if you hurt her you'll have half the creatures of this world on a revenge mission," Tailor leaned backwards onto an ironing board behind him. "But she's a child." Tailor seemed to look straight into him. "You understand?"

            "Not quite," he said cautiously. "One question, since you seem to know so much; What am I doing here? What am I meant to do?"

            "Silly boy," said Tailor, giving him a light tap with the back of what would have been a hand. "You're a hero. You're here to save the world."

            He was going to ask from what when Argie ran back up to the two of them. "Are you ready to go?"

            "Ready as I'll ever be, I suppose," he said, smiling down at the girl despite the anxiety stirred by the previous conversation. "Say, where did Dial get off to?"

            "Oh, uh," Argie held her arms behind her, rocking on the heels of her boots. "Dial's staying here for a bit. 's what I was talking to Cell about."

            "Is he now?" Hero raised his eyebrows. "Well, if that'll make him happy."

            "I think it will." Argie's eye was suddenly caught by something behind Hero, and she perked up onto her toes with a wide grin. "There he is! C'mon, Hero, I want you to meet someone!"

            "Hm?" he asked, turning to watch the girl run off towards the edge of the carousel again. The bird whom he'd seen earlier had returned, another figure accompanying them. "Who-?"

            He wasn't sure what, but something, something nostalgic and just slightly off enough to cause him pause, made him root his heels where he was and stole the words from his waiting lips.

            Argie had no such qualms and ran towards the newcomer with open arms and a bright laugh. He greeted her with a similar embrace, picking her up in one swift motion, black trenchcoat swishing with the dramatic movement. He settled the girl on his thin hip and a glass prism turned to fix its pointed end on the frozen Hero.

            "Hero!" Argie called from the stranger's hip. "Come meet Magnus!"


End file.
